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In database design, a composite key is a candidate key that consists of two or more attributes, [1] [2] [3] (table columns) that together uniquely identify an entity occurrence (table row). A compound key is a composite key for which each attribute that makes up the key is a foreign key in its own right.
Each of attributes being part of a PK (or of a FK) must have data values (such as numbers, letters or typographic symbols) but not data marks (also known as NULL marks in SQL world). Morphologically, a composite primary key is in a "steady state": If it is reduced, PK will lose its property of identifying every row of its relation but if it is ...
If such a data model is represented as relations, a repeating group would be an attribute where the value is itself a relation. First normal form eliminates nested relations by turning them into separate "top-level" relations associated with the parent row through foreign keys rather than through direct containment.
A primary key uniquely specifies a tuple within a table. While natural attributes (attributes used to describe the data being entered) are sometimes good primary keys, surrogate keys are often used instead. A surrogate key is an artificial attribute assigned to an object which uniquely identifies it (for instance, in a table of information ...
The heading defines a set of attributes, each with a name and data type (sometimes called a domain). The number of attributes in this set is the relation's degree or arity. The body is a set of tuples. A tuple is a collection of n values, where n is the relation's degree, and each value in the tuple corresponds to a unique attribute. [6]
The columns in a candidate key are called prime attributes, [3] and a column that does not occur in any candidate key is called a non-prime attribute. Every relation without NULL values will have at least one candidate key: Since there cannot be duplicate rows, the set of all columns is a superkey, and if that isn't minimal, some subset of that ...
An attribute in a relational database can be represented as a column or field. In computing, an attribute is a specification that defines a property of an object, element, or file. It may also refer to or set the specific value for a given instance of such. For clarity, attributes should more correctly be considered metadata. An attribute is ...
Scalar columns (columns cannot contain relations or composite values) [5] Every non-prime attribute has a full functional dependency on each candidate key (attributes depend on the whole of every key) [5] Every non-trivial functional dependency either begins with a superkey or ends with a prime attribute (attributes depend only on candidate ...