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Can we use the universal instance assumption without using nulls?

Published: 29 April 1981 Publication History

Abstract

We claim that the representative instance of [Ho1, Va3] is a correct representation of the data stored in a database even when the relations of the database are not the projections of a single universal instance. If no constraint (other than functional and join dependencies) is imposed on the data, then projections of the representative instance cannot always be computed by lossless joins. We show that if the database satisfies a modified foreign-key constraint, then projections of the representative instance can be computed by performing the union of several lossless joins. A class of relation schemes for which no constraint is necessary is characterized, and we show how to compute projections of the representative instance for databases that belong to this class.

References

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      SIGMOD '81: Proceedings of the 1981 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
      April 1981
      237 pages
      ISBN:0897910400
      DOI:10.1145/582318
      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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      Published: 29 April 1981

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