Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
A relation is in first normal form if and only if no attribute domain has relations as elements. [1] Or more informally, that no table column can have tables as values. Database normalization is the process of representing a database in terms of relations in standard normal forms, where first normal is a minimal requirement.
Columns have unique names within the same table. Each column has a domain (or data type) which defines the allowed values in the column. All rows in a table have the same set of columns. This definition does not preclude columns having sets or relations as values, e.g. nested tables. This is the major difference to first normal form.
In situations where the number of unique values of a column is far less than the number of rows in the table, column-oriented storage allow significant savings in space through data compression. Columnar storage also allows fast execution of range queries (e.g., show all records where a particular column is between X and Y, or less than X.)
An example of a data table column with low-cardinality would be a CUSTOMER table with a column named NEW_CUSTOMER. This column would contain only two distinct values: Y or N, denoting whether the customer was new or not. Since there are only two possible values held in this column, its cardinality type would be referred to as low-cardinality. [2]
In SQL, the unique keys have a UNIQUE constraint assigned to them in order to prevent duplicates (a duplicate entry is not valid in a unique column). Alternate keys may be used like the primary key when doing a single-table select or when filtering in a where clause, but are not typically used to join multiple tables.
It does not have any non-prime attribute that is functionally dependent on any proper subset of any candidate key of the relation (i.e. it lacks partial dependencies). A non-prime attribute of a relation is an attribute that is not a part of any candidate key of the relation. Put simply, a relation (or table) is in 2NF if:
Each column in an SQL table declares the type(s) that column may contain. ANSI SQL includes the following data types. [14] Character strings and national character strings. CHARACTER(n) (or CHAR(n)): fixed-width n-character string, padded with spaces as needed; CHARACTER VARYING(n) (or VARCHAR(n)): variable-width string with a maximum size of n ...
[2] [3] Instead, each element is termed an attribute value. An attribute is a name paired with a domain (nowadays more commonly referred to as a type or data type ). An attribute value is an attribute name paired with an element of that attribute's domain, and a tuple is a set of attribute values in which no two distinct elements have the same ...