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Safety and Domain Independence

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

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Synonyms

Finiteness

Definition

The values in the relations of a relational database are elements of one or more underlying sets called domains. In practical applications, a domain may be infinite, e.g., the set of natural numbers. In this case, the value of a relational calculus query when applied to such a database may be infinite, e.g., {n| n ≥ 10}. A query Q is called finite if the value of Q when applied to any database is finite.

Even when the database domains are finite, all that is normally known about them is that they are some finite superset of the values that occur in the database. In this case, the value of a relational calculus query may depend on such an unknown domain, e.g., {x ∣ ∀ yR(x, y)}. A query Q is called domain independent if the value of Q when applied to any database is the same for any two domains containing the database values or, equivalently, if the value of Q when applied to a database contains only values that occur in the database.

The term safequery...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Griffith University, Nathan, QLD, Australia

    Rodney Topor

Authors
  1. Rodney Topor
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Correspondence to Rodney Topor .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Crichton Street, EH8 9LE, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

    Leonid Libkin

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Topor, R. (2016). Safety and Domain Independence. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_1255-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_1255-2

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  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-7993-3

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