Derivability, redundancy and consistency of relations stored in large data banks

ABSTRACT

The large, integrated data banks of the future will contain many relations of various degrees in stored form. It will not be unusual for this set of stored relations to be redundant. Two types of redundancy are defined and discussed. One type may be employed to improve accessibility of certain kinds of information which happen to be in great demand. When either type of redundancy exists, those responsible for control of the data bank should know about it and have some means of detecting any "logical" inconsistencies in the total set of stored relations. Consistency checking might be helpful in tracking down unauthorized (and possibly fraudulent) changes in the data bank contents.

REFERENCES

• 1: C.W. Bachman, YSoftware for Random Access Processing," Datamation, April 1965.
• 2: W.C. McGee, "Generalized File Processing," Annual Review in Automatic Programming 5, 13, pp. 77--149, Pergamon Press, 1969.
• 3: George H. Mealy, Another look at data, Proceedings of the November 14-16, 1967, fall joint computer conference, November 14-16, 1967, Anaheim, California [doi>10.1145/1465611.1465682]
• 4: A. Church, "An Introduction to Mathematical Logic I," Princeton, 1956.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.7 Database Administration

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.4 Systems
          Subjects: Relational databases