Automated database schema design using mined data dependencies
S. K. M. Wong, Cory J. Butz, Y. Xiang · Journal of the American Society for Information Science · 1998
Data dependencies are used in database schema design to enforce the correctness of a database as well as to reduce redundant data. These dependencies are usually determined from the semantics of the attributes and are then enforced upon the relations. This paper describes a bottom-up procedure for discovering multivalued dependencies (MVDs) in observed data without knowing `a priori the relationships amongst the attributes. The proposed algorithm is an application of the technique we designed for learning conditional independencies in probabilistic reasoning. A prototype system for automated database schema design has been implemented. Experiments were carried out to demonstrate both the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. 1