Milestone : Definitions

• We start from a single universal relation schema

• R = {A1, A2, ..., An}

• that includes all the attributed of the database.

• We can make the universal relation assumption, which states that every attribute name is unique.

• The set F of functional dependencies that should hold on the attributes of R is specified by the database designers and is made available to the design algorithms.

• Using the functional dependencies, the algorithms decompose the universal relation schema R into a set of relation schemas

• D = {R1,R2, ..., Rm}

• that will become the relational database schema; D is called the decomposition of R.