A theory of data dependencies over relational expressions

A formal system is developed for reasoning about a class of dependencies that includes all classes considered in the literature. The usefulness of the system is illustrated by applying it to various database design problems. The system is shown to be sound and complete by adapting the analytic tableaux method of first-order predicate calculus to the class of dependencies adopted. Finally, the method is shown to be a decision procedure for the inference problem of a subclass of the dependencies considered.

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