Extending Dependencies with Conditions

This paper introduces a class of conditional inclusion dependencies (CINDs), which extends traditional inclusion dependencies (INDs) by enforcing bindings of semantically related data values. We show that CINDs are useful not only in data cleaning, but are also in contextual schema matching [7]. To make effective use of CINDs in practice, it is often necessary to reason about them. The most important static analysis issue concerns consistency, to determine whether or not a given set of CINDs has conflicts. Another issue concerns implication, i.e., deciding whether a set of CINDs entails another CIND. We give a full treatment of the static analyses of CINDs, and show that CINDs retain most nice properties of traditional INDs: (a) CINDs are always consistent; (b) CINDs are finitely axiomatizable, i.e., there exists a sound and complete inference system for implication of CINDs; and (c) the implication problem for CINDs has the same complexity as its traditional counterpart, namely, PSPA...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: VLDB
• Authors: Loreto Bravo, Wenfei Fan, Shuai Ma
• Keywords: Database, VLDB 2007