This work is supported by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA), grant T042706.Current methods of database schema design are usually based on modeling the real world as entity (or object) classes with relationships among them. Properties of relationships can be described by semantical database constraints. One of them is functional dependency, which has a key role in traditional database design. The three basic types of binary relationships that can be described by functional dependencies...

Codd defined the relational algebra [E.F. Codd, Communications of the ACM 13 (1970) 377–387; E.F. Codd, Relational completeness of data base sublanguages, in Data Base Systems, R. Rustin, Ed., Prentice-Hall (1972) 65–98] as the algebra with operations projection, join, restriction, union and difference. His projection operator can drop, permute and repeat columns of a relation. This permuting and repeating of columns does not really add expressive power to the relational algebra. Indeed, using the...

Codd defined the relational algebra [E.F. Codd, Communications of the ACM13 (1970) 377–387; E.F. Codd, Relational completeness of data base sublanguages, in Data Base Systems, R. Rustin, Ed., Prentice-Hall (1972) 65–98] as the algebra with operations projection, join, restriction, union and difference. His projection operator can drop, permute and repeat columns of a relation. This permuting and repeating of columns does not really add expressive power to the relational algebra. Indeed, ...