An Analysis of Multivalued and Join Dependencies Based on the Entity-Relationship Approach

Abstract In this paper, we show that multivalued dependencies and join dependencies are not very viable for certain cases of relational database design; they are sometimes difficult to be identified; they are relation sensitive; and we are unable to talk about these types of dependencies without referring to some specific relation. We also show that the entity-relationship approach can be used for relational database design without any of the above mentioned undesirable properties of multivalued dependencies and join dependencies.

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