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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.
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.)
While tables have to be stored and presented in some order, this is unstable and implementation dependent. If a specific ordering needs to be represented, it has to be in the form of data, e.g. a "number" column. Columns have unique names within the same table. Each column has a domain (or data type) which defines the allowed values in the column.
"Don't repeat yourself" (DRY), also known as "duplication is evil", is a principle of software development aimed at reducing repetition of information which is likely to change, replacing it with abstractions that are less likely to change, or using data normalization which avoids redundancy in the first place.
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.
A database relation (e.g. a database table) is said to meet third normal form standards if all the attributes (e.g. database columns) are functionally dependent on solely a key, except the case of functional dependency whose right hand side is a prime attribute (an attribute which is strictly included into some key).
In a database, a table is a collection of related data organized in table format; consisting of columns and rows.. In relational databases, and flat file databases, a table is a set of data elements (values) using a model of vertical columns (identifiable by name) and horizontal rows, the cell being the unit where a row and column intersect. [1]
An associative (or junction) table maps two or more tables together by referencing the primary keys (PK) of each data table. In effect, it contains a number of foreign keys (FK), each in a many-to-one relationship from the junction table to the individual data tables. The PK of the associative table is typically composed of the FK columns ...