On relational algebra with marked nulls preliminary version
Witold J. Lipski · 1984
We formulate some natural conditions which should be satisfied in an extension of the relational algebra from the usual relations to tables with null values, and we explain the motivation behind these conditions. Roughly speaking, our conditions say that the extended algebra makes it possible to correctly compute the "true tuples" in the result of applying a relational expression (query) to tables with nulls (database state), and that the computation can be carried out recursively, following the structure of the expression. We prove that these conditions are exactly equivalent to other conditions proposed earlier by the author and T. Imieliński. We give a simple proof of the correctness of the "naive" extension of the relational algebra to tables with marked nulls, where the nulls are treated as if they were regular values, and which supports the operations of projection, positive selection, union, join and renaming of attributes. We also show that the result of the naive evaluation of such an expression (query) is equal to the response to the query as defined --- in a proof-theoretic framework --- by Reiter.