Answering queries in relational databases

Abstract

This paper concerns query answering in relational databases. We assume a universe U of attributes and a set of values associated with each attribute. A database scheme is a given collection R = {1, 2, ..., n} of subsets of U, called relation schemes. A query in R is any subset of U. We call "context" any joinable subset of R. An unambiguous context is one in which a query receives the same answer independently of the subcontext used for the computation. A formal treatment of unambiguous contexts is presented and it is shown that they provide a suitable basis for discussing the universal relation assumption, the relationship uniqueness assumption, maximal objects, and other related concepts.