Notions of dependency satisfaction

Abstract

Two notions of dependency satisfaction, consistency and completeness, are introduced. Consistency is the natural generalization of weak satisfaction and seems appropriate when only equality-generating dependencies are given, but disagrees with the standard notion in the presence of tuple-generating dependencies. Completeness is based on the intuitive semantics of tuple-generating dependencies but appears unnatural for equality-generating dependencies. It is argued that neither approach is the correct one, but rather that they correspond to different policies on constraint enforcement, and each one is appropriate in different circumstances. Consistency and completeness of a state are characterized in terms of the tableau associated with the state and in terms of logical properties of a set of first-order sentences associated with the state. A close relation between the problems of testing for consistency and completeness and of testing implication of dependencies is established. The possibility of formalizing dependency satisfaction without using a universal relation scheme is examined.