The interaction between functional dependencies and template dependencies

Abstract

A large class of dependencies, called template dependencies, was introduced in Sadri and Ullman [1979], and a complete set of inference rules (axioms) was given for it. In this paper, we investigate the interaction between template dependencies and functional dependencies. We develop techniques for partially deciding which template and functional dependencies are logically implied by a set of template and functional dependencies. Since template dependencies include all dependencies, besides functional dependencies, known to us (such as multivalued, join, mutual, generalized mutual, and subset dependencies, and their embedded versions), the results of this paper enable us to apply the techniques from Sadri and Ullman [1979] to any set of data dependencies.