Chapter 6

The Relational
Algebra and
Relational
Calculus

Copyright © 2011 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Pearson Addison-Wesley

 Chapter 6 Outline
 Unary Relational Operations: SELECT and
PROJECT
 Relational Algebra Operations from Set
Theory
 Binary Relational Operations: JOIN and
DIVISION
 Additional Relational Operations

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 Chapter 6 Outline (cont’d.)
 Examples of Queries in Relational Algebra
 The Tuple Relational Calculus
 The Domain Relational Calculus

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 The WHAT and the HOW
 SQL = WHAT we want to get from the data
 Relational Algebra = HOW to get the data we
want
 Move from WHAT to HOW is query optimization
 SQL ~> Relational Algebra ~> Physical Plan
 Relational Algebra = Logical Plan

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 The Relational Algebra and
Relational Calculus
 Relational algebra
 Basic set of operations for the relational model
 Relational algebra expression
 Sequence of relational algebra operations
 Relational calculus
 Higher-level declarative language for
specifying relational queries

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 Relational Algebra Overview
 Relational algebra is the basic set of
operations for the relational model
 These operations enable a user to specify
basic retrieval requests (or Queries)
 The result of an operation is a new relation,
which may have been formed from one or
more input relations

Copyright © 2011 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe

 Relational Algebra Overview cont…

 The algebra operations that produce new

relations
 These can be further manipulated using
operations of the same algebra
 A sequence of relational algebra operations
forms a relational algebra expression
 The result of a relational algebra expression is
also a relation that represents a query (or
retrieval request)

Copyright © 2011 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe

 Relational Algebra Overview cont…

 Unary Relational Operations

 SELECT (symbol  (sigma))
 PROJECT (symbol  (pi))
 RENAME (symbol  (rho))
 Relational Algebra Operations from Set Theory
 UNION (), INTERSECTION (), DEFFERENCE (or MINUS, -)
 CARTISIAN PRODUCT (x)
 Binary Relational Operations
 JOIN (several variations of JOIN exist)
 DIVISION
 Additional Relational Operations
 OUTER JOINS, OUTER UNION
 AGGREGATE FUNCTIONS (e.g., SUM, COUNT, AVG, MAX, MIN)

Copyright © 2011 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe

 Unary Relational Operations:
SELECT and PROJECT
 The SELECT Operation (- segma )
 Subset of the tuples from a relation that satisfies
a selection condition:

• The sele ction condition acts as a filter

• Boolean expression contains clauses of the form
<attribute name> <comparison op> <constant value>
or
• <attribute name> <comparison op> <attribute name>

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 Database System Concepts ©Silberschatz,
Korth and Sudarshan th Edition
Copyright © 2011 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Unary Relational Operations:
SELECT and PROJECT (cont’d.)
 Example:

 <selection condition> applied independently

to each individual tuple t in R
 If condition evaluates to TRUE, tuple selected
 Boolean conditions AND, OR, and NOT
 Unary
 Applied to a single relation

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Copyright © 2011 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Unary Relational Operations:
SELECT and PROJECT (cont’d.)
 Selectivity
 Fraction of tuples selected by a selection
condition
 SELECT operation commutative
 Cascade SELECT operations into a single
operation with AND condition

Copyright © 2011 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe

 The PROJECT Operation
 Selects columns from table and discards
the other columns:

 Degree
 Number of attributes in <attribute list>
 Duplicate elimination
 Result of PROJECT operation is a set of
distinct tuples

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Copyright © 2011 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Sequences of Operations and
the RENAME Operation
 In-line expression:

 Sequence of operations:

 Rename attributes in intermediate results

 RENAME operation

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Copyright © 2011 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Relational Algebra Operations
from Set Theory
 UNION, INTERSECTION, and MINUS
 Merge the elements of two sets in various ways
 Binary operations
 Relations must have the same type of tuples
 UNION
 R∪S
 Includes all tuples that are either in R or in S or
in both R and S
 Duplicate tuples eliminated
Copyright © 2011 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Relational Algebra Operations
from Set Theory (cont’d.)
 INTERSECTION
 R∩S
 Includes all tuples that are in both R and S
 SET DIFFERENCE (or MINUS)
 R–S
 Includes all tuples that are in R but not in S

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 The CARTESIAN PRODUCT
(CROSS PRODUCT) Operation
 CARTESIAN PRODUCT
 CROSS PRODUCT or CROSS JOIN
 Denoted by ×
 Binary set operation
 Relations do not have to be union compatible
 Useful when followed by a selection that
matches values of attributes

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 Binary Relational Operations:
JOIN and DIVISION
 The JOIN Operation
 Denoted by
 Combine related tuples from two relations into
single “longer” tuples
 General join condition of the form <condition>
AND <condition> AND...AND <condition>
 Example:

Copyright © 2011 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe

 Binary Relational Operations:
JOIN and DIVISION (cont’d.)
 THETA JOIN
 Each <condition> of the form Ai θ Bj
 Ai is an attribute of R
 Bj is an attribute of S
 Ai and Bj have the same domain
 θ (theta) is one of the comparison operators:
• {=, <, ≤, >, ≥, ≠}

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Copyright © 2011 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe
 Variations of JOIN: The
EQUIJOIN and NATURAL JOIN
 EQUIJOIN
 Only = comparison operator used
 Always have one or more pairs of attributes
that have identical values in every tuple
 NATURAL JOIN
 Denoted by *
 Removes second (superfluous) attribute in an
EQUIJOIN condition

Copyright © 2011 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe

 Variations of JOIN: The
EQUIJOIN and NATURAL JOIN
(cont’d.)
 Join selectivity
 Expected size of join result divided by the
maximum size nR * nS
 Inner joins
 Type of match and combine operation
 Defined formally as a combination of
CARTESIAN PRODUCT and SELECTION

Copyright © 2011 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe

 A Complete Set of Relational
Algebra Operations
 Set of relational algebra operations {σ, π,
∪, ρ, –, ×} is a complete set
 Any relational algebra operation can be
expressed as a sequence of operations from
this set

Copyright © 2011 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe

 The DIVISION Operation
 Denoted by ÷
 Example: retrieve the names of employees
who work on all the projects that ‘John
Smith’ works on
 Apply to relations R(Z) ÷ S(X)
 Attributes of R are a subset of the attributes of
S

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Operations of Relational Algebra

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Operations of Relational Algebra
(cont’d.)

Copyright © 2011 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe

 We can classify the Relational
Algebra operators to:
 Set theoretic operators
 union “∪”, intersection “∩”, difference “\”
 Renaming operator ρ
 Removal operators
projection π, selection σ
 Combination operators
Cartesian product “×”, joins “ ”
 Extended operators
duplicate elimination, grouping, aggregation, sorting,
outer joins, etc.

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SQL - RELATIONAL ALGEBRA

How to implement relational algebra in SQL?

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Copyright © 2011 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe