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On the expressive power of data dependencies

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Summary

The class of data dependencies is a class of first-order sentences that seem to be suitable to express semantic constraints for relational databases. We deal with the question of which classes of databases are axiomatizable by data dependencies. (A class Γ of databases is said to be axiomatizable by sentences of a certain kind if there exists a set of sentences of that kind such that Γ is the class of all models of that set.) Our results characterize, by algebraic closure conditions, classes of databases that are axiomatizable by dependencies of different kinds. Our technique is model-theoretic, and the characterization easily entails all previously known results on axiomatizability by dependencies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Computer Science, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

    Johann A. Makowsky

  2. IBM Almaden Research Center, 95120, San Jose, CA, USA

    Moshe Y. Vardi

Authors
  1. Johann A. Makowsky
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  2. Moshe Y. Vardi
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Additional information

Research partially supported by Swiss National Science Foundation Grant No. 82.820.0.80 (1980–1982), revision of the paper was done while visiting the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Summer 1985)

Part of the research reported here was done while the author was at Stanford University and supported by a Weizmann Post-Doctoral Fellowship and AFOSR grant 80-0212

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Makowsky, J.A., Vardi, M.Y. On the expressive power of data dependencies. Acta Informatica 23, 231–244 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00289111

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