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Rules of Functional Dependencies

Rules of Functional Dependencies

In this lesson, we will take a look at the different rules of FDs.

Armstrong’s axioms

Armstrong’s axioms are a set of inference rules used to infer all the functional dependencies on a relational database. They were developed by William W. Armstrong in 1974.

We will denote a set of attributes by the letters X, Y, and Z. Also, we will represent the union of two sets of attributes X and Y by XY instead of the usual X \cup Y; this notation is rather standard in database theory when dealing with sets of attributes.

We will now highlight the three primary rules:

Axiom of reflexivity

This axiom says, if Y is a subset of X, then X determines Y.

If Y \subseteq X then , X \rightarrow ...