A relational model of data for large shared data banks
Communications of the ACM
A hierarchical method for synthesizing relations
ACM-SE 20 Proceedings of the 20th annual Southeast regional conference
Instance-based attribute identification in database integration
The VLDB Journal — The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases
ACM SIGMOD Record
A sophisticate's introduction to database normalization theory
VLDB '78 Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Very Large Data Bases - Volume 4
Automated reasoning to infer all minimal keys
IJCAI'13 Proceedings of the Twenty-Third international joint conference on Artificial Intelligence
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The candidate keys, as defined by E. F. Codd [4], are important in the process of reducing a normalized relation into second and third normal forms.Given a set of functional relations, Delobel and Casey [6] transformed this set into a Boolean function and it was shown that the set of all prime implicants of this function that have no primed variables are the only candidate keys.Starting only with the functional relations (dependencies), a new approach is proposed for finding all the candidate keys of a normalized relation without using a Boolean function. The algorithm depends on an implication matrix, its transitive closure and a systematic method for introducing attributes to form keys.This algorithm is suitable for hand computation as well as computer implementation.