Discovery of “interesting” data dependencies from a workload of SQL statements

Abstract

Discovering data dependencies consists in producing the whole set of a given class of data dependencies holding in a database, the task of selecting the interesting ones being usually left to an expert user. In this paper we take another look at the problems of discovering inclusion and functional dependencies in relational databases. We define rigourously the so-called logical navigation from a workload of SQL statements. This assumption leads us to devise tractable algorithms for discovering “interesting” inclusion and functional dependencies.