Abstract
Roughly, we define a redundant relation in a database instance (dbi) as a k-ary relation R such that there is a first-order query which evaluated in the reduced dbi, gives us R. So, we can eliminate that relation R as long as the equivalence classes of the relation of equality of the first-order types for all k-tuples in the dbi are not altered. It turns out that in a fixed dbi, the problem of deciding whether a given relation in the dbi is redundant is decidable, though intractable. We then study redundant relations with a restricted notion of equivalence so that the problem becomes tractable.
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Ferrarotti, F.A., Paoletti, A.L., Turull Torres, J.M. (2009). First-Order Types and Redundant Relations in Relational Databases. In: Heuser, C.A., Pernul, G. (eds) Advances in Conceptual Modeling - Challenging Perspectives. ER 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5833. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04947-7_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04947-7_9
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