CSC271 Database Systems

Lecture # 5
 Summary: Previous Lecture
 Database languages
 Functions of a DBMS

 DBMS environment

 Data models and their categories

The Relational Model

Chapter 3
 History of Relational Model
 Proposed by E.F. Codd in 1970
 “ A relational model of data for large shared data banks”

 Objectives of relational model

 High degree of data independence
 Dealing with issues e.g. data semantics, consistencies, and
redundancy
 To enable the expansion of set-oriented data manipulation
languages
 Examples of RDBMSs
 Oracle
 Microsoft SQLServer
 Microsoft Access
 Visual FoxPro
 InterBase
 JDataStore
 R:Base
 Relational Model
 Based on mathematical concept of a
relation
 Which is physically represented as a table
 Codd, a trained mathematician, used
terminology taken from mathematics,
principally set theory and predicate logic
 Relational Model Terminology
 A relation is a table with columns and rows
 Only applies to logical structure of the database (external
and conceptual level of ANSI-SPARC architecture), not
the physical structure
 Attributeis a named column of a relation
 Domain is the set of allowable values for
one or more attributes
 Relational Model Terminology..
 Tuple is a row of a relation
 Degree is the number of attributes in a
relation
 Cardinality is the number of tuples in a
relation
 Relational Database is a collection of
normalized relations with distinct relation
names
Instances of Sample Relations
Examples of Attribute Domains
Alternative Terminology
 Mathematical Relations
 Consider two sets, D1 & D2,
 Where D1 = {2, 4} and D2 = {1, 3, 5}

 Cartesian product, D1 x D2 is,

 Set of all ordered pairs, where first element is member of
D1 and second element is member of D2
 D1 x D2 = {(2, 1), (2, 3), (2, 5), (4, 1), (4, 3), (4, 5)}
 Alternative way is to find all combinations of elements
with first from D1 and second from D2
 Mathematical Relations..
 Any subset of Cartesian product is a
relation; e.g.
 R = {(2, 1), (4, 1)}
 May specify which pairs are in relation using some
condition for selection; e.g.
 Second element is 1:
 R = {(x, y) | x  D1, y  D2, and y = 1}
 First element is always twice the second:
 S = {(x, y) | x  D1, y  D2, and x = 2y}
 Mathematical Relations..
 Relating with database relations
 Consider Branch relation in the example where
branchNo = {B002,B003} city = {London, Glasgow}
 Cartesian product, branchNo x city is,
{(B002, London), (B002, Glasgow), (B003, London), (B003, Glasgow)}

 Any subset of Cartesian product is a

relation
 Mathematical Relations..
 Consider three sets D1, D2, D3 with
Cartesian Product D1 x D2 x D3, e.g.
 D1 = {1, 3} D2 = {2, 4} D3 = {5, 6}
 D1 x D2 x D3 =
{(1,2,5), (1,2,6), (1,4,5), (1,4,6), (3,2,5), (3,2,6), (3,4,5), (3,4,6)}
 Any subset of these ordered triples is a relation
 Mathematical Relations..
 Cartesian product of n sets (D1, D2,…, Dn)
is:
 D1 x D2 x . . . x Dn = {(d1, d2, . . . , dn) | d1  D1, d2  D2,
. . . , dn  Dn}
 Usually written as:
n
XDi
i=1
 Any set of n-tuples from this Cartesian product is a
relation on the n sets
 Database Relations
 Relation schema
 Named relation defined by a set of attribute and domain
name pairs
 Let A1, A2,...,An be attributes with domains D1, D2,..., Dn
 Then the set {A1:D1, A2:D2, ... , An:Dn} is a relation
schema
 A relation R defined by a relation schema S is a set of
mappings from the attribute names to their corresponding
domains. Thus, relation R is a set of n-tuples:
 (A1:d1, A2:d2,..., An:dn) such that
 d1 D1, d2 D2,..., dn Dn
 Database Relations
 Relation schema
 Named relation defined by a set of attribute and domain
name pairs
 Let A1, A2,...,An be attributes with domains D1, D2,..., Dn
 Then the set {A1:D1, A2:D2, ... , An:Dn} is a relation
schema
 A relation R defined by a relation schema S is a set of
mappings from the attribute names to their corresponding
domains. Thus, relation R is a set of n-tuples:
 (A1:d1, A2:d2,..., An:dn) such that
 d1 D1, d2 D2,..., dn Dn
 Database Relations..
 Branch relation schema
 Branch =
{branchNo:BranchNumbers, street: StreetNames, city: CityNames, postcode:PostCodes}

 Tuple of a Branch relation

{branchNo:B005, street: 22 Deer Rd, city: London, postcode:SW1 4EH}
 Relational Database Schema
 If R1, R2,..., Rn are a set of relation
schemas, then we can write the relational
database schema, or simply relational
schema, R, as:

R= {R1, R2,..., Rn}

 Properties of Relations
 Relation name is distinct from all other
relation names in relational schema
 Each cell of relation contains exactly one
atomic (single) value
 Each attribute has a distinct name
 Values of an attribute are all from the same
domain
 Properties of Relations..
 Each tuple is distinct; there are no duplicate
tuples
 Order of attributes has no significance
 Order of tuples has no significance,
theoretically
 Summary
 Relational model terminology
 Mathematical relations

 Database relations

 Properties of a relation
 References
 All the material (slides, diagrams etc.)
presented in this lecture is taken (with
modifications) from the Pearson Education
website :
 http://www.booksites.net/connbegg