Abstract
We have tried to show that the notion of inheritance leads to a natural representation of the operators of the relational algebra and that some of the basic properties of relational database theory, such as Armstrong's axioms, can be derived from some very simple domain theoretic relationships. If these ideas have any value one would expect to be able to represent other notions in database theory, such as multi-valued dependencies and the universal relation assumption within the same framework. However, given the apparent connection with Scott's “Information Systems”, a more pressing need is to work out a proper denotational semantics for relational databases.
In the longer term we hope that it will be possible to use an approach such as this to produce better type systems for database programming languages.
Much of this work was carried out while Peter Buneman was a visiting SERC research fellow at the University of Glasgow, Scotland and while Atsushi Ohori was on leave from OKI Electric Co., Japan. It was also supported by an NSF CER grant MCS82-19196.
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Buneman, P., Ohori, A. (1986). A domain theoretic approach to higher-order relations. In: Ausiello, G., Atzeni, P. (eds) ICDT '86. ICDT 1986. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 243. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-17187-8_31
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-17187-8_31
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