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SQL-based discovery of exact and approximate functional dependencies

Published: 28 June 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Students in a typical database course are introduced to theoretical design from a functional dependency standpoint. Functional dependencies are rules of the form X→Y, where X and Y are attributes of a relation r(R). Those rules express the potential one-to-one, and many-to-one relationships among the atributes of R. Unfortunately finding the non-trivial rules X→Y from an existing arbitrary relation is a hard problem. We present an extension of the SQL-based algorithm of Bell and Brockhausen [1] to explore a relation and find its exact and approximate functional dependencies. We use the g3 measure of Kivinen and Mannila to express the degree of approximation of a dependency. This application could be used either as an example or a project in an advanced database course.

References

[1]
Bell. S. Brockhausen, P. {1995}. Discovery of Data Dependencies in Relational Databases. In Kodratoff, Y. Nakhaeizadeh, G., and Taylor C. (eds). Statistics, Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases.]]
[2]
Flach, P. A., Savnik, I. {1999}. Database dependency discovery: a machine learning approach. AI Communications. 12:3(139--160).]]
[3]
Giannella, C., Robertson, E. {2001}. On an Information Theoretic Approximation Measure for Functional Dependencies. Technical Report TR555. University of Indiana. Bloomington, Indiana.]]
[4]
Huhtala, Y., Käkkäinen, J., Porkka, P. Toivonen, H. {1998}. Efficient discovery of functional and approximate dependencies using partitions. Proc. International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE'98). pps. 392--401.]]
[5]
Huhtala, Y., Käkkäinen, J., Porkka, P. Toivonen, H. {1999}. TANE: An Efficient Algorithm for Discovering Functional and Approximate Dependencies. The Computer Journal. 42:2(100--111).]]
[6]
Kiniven, J. and Mannila, H., Approximate inference of functional dependencies and Armstrong relations. Theoretical Computer Science, 149(1):129--149, 1995.]]
[7]
Lopes S., Petit J., Lakhal L., "A framework for understanding existing databases". Proceeding of the International Database Engineering and Applications Symposium. 1098--8068/01, IEEE IDEAS 2001.]]
[8]
Lopes S., Petit J.-M., and Lakhal, L., Efficient discovery of functional dependencies and armstrong relations. In C. Zaniolo, P. C. Lockemann, M. H. Scholl, and T. Grust, editors, Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Extending Database Technology, Konstanz, Germany, volume 1777 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 350--364. Springer, 2000.]]
[9]
Maier, D., The Relational Theory of Databases. Computer Science Press. 1983.]]
[10]
Mannila, H, Raiha K., The Design of Relational Databases. Addison-Wesley, 1994.]]
[11]
Mannila, H., and Raiha, K. On the complexity of inferring functional dependencies, Discrete Appl. Math. 40 (1992) 237--243.]]

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGCSE Bulletin
ACM SIGCSE Bulletin  Volume 36, Issue 4
December 2004
145 pages
ISSN:0097-8418
DOI:10.1145/1041624
Issue’s Table of Contents
  • cover image ACM Conferences
    ITiCSE-WGR '04: Working group reports from ITiCSE on Innovation and technology in computer science education
    June 2004
    152 pages
    ISBN:9781450377942
    DOI:10.1145/1044550
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 28 June 2004
Published in SIGCSE Volume 36, Issue 4

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Author Tags

  1. SQL
  2. computer and information science education
  3. database management
  4. functional dependencies
  5. languages

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