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Database abstractions: aggregation

Authors:

John Miles Smith,

Diane C. P. SmithAuthors Info & Claims

Communications of the ACM, Volume 20, Issue 6

Pages 405 - 413

https://doi.org/10.1145/359605.359620

Published: 01 June 1977 Publication History

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Abstract

Aggregation is introduced as an abstraction which is important in conceptualizing the real world. Aggregation transforms a relationship between objects into a higher-level object. A new data type, called aggregate, is developed which, under certain criteria of “well-definedness,” specifies aggregation abstractions. Relational databases defined as collections of aggregates are structured as a hierarchy of n-ary relations. To maintain well-definedness, update operations on such databases must preserve two invariants. Well-defined relations are distinct from relations in third normal form. It is shown that these notions are complementary and both are important in database design. A top-down methodology for database design is described which separates decisions concerning aggregate structure from decisions concerning key identification. It is suggested that aggregate types, and other types which support real-world abstractions without introducing implementation detail, should be incorporated into programming languages.

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Published In

Communications of the ACM Volume 20, Issue 6

June 1977

84 pages

ISSN:0001-0782

EISSN:1557-7317

DOI:10.1145/359605

Editor:
Robert L. Ashenhurst
Univ. of Chicago, Chicago, IL

Issue’s Table of Contents

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: 01 June 1977

Published in CACM Volume 20, Issue 6

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Hou PAo JSchatz KGulyuk AYingling YChirkova R(2023)Provenance-Aware Data Integration and Summarization Querying for Knowledge GraphsInformation Integration and Web Intelligence10.1007/978-3-031-48316-5_29(293-308)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2023
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