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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 945–950Cite as

Database Dependencies

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Synonyms

Database constraints; Data dependency

Definition

For a relational database to be valid, it is not sufficient that the various tables of which it is composed conform to the database schema. In addition, the instance must also conform to the intended meaning of the database [19]. While many aspects of this intended meaning are inherently informal, it will generally induce certain formalizable relationships between the data in the database, in the sense that whenever a certain pattern is present among the data, this pattern can either be extended or certain data values must be equal. Such a relationship is called a database dependency. The vast majority of database dependencies in the literature are of the following form [6]:

$$ \begin{array}{ll}&{}\left(\forall {x}_1\right)\dots \left(\forall {x}_n\right)\varphi \left({x}_1,\dots, {x}_n\right)\\ &{}\Rightarrow \left(\exists {z}_1\right)\dots \left(\exists {z}_k\right)\psi \left({y}_1,\dots, {y}_m,{z}_1,\dots,...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hasselt University, Hasselt, Belgium

    Marc Gyssens

Authors
  1. Marc Gyssens
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Correspondence to Marc Gyssens .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

    Leonid Libkin

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Gyssens, M. (2018). Database Dependencies. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_1236

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