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Keys in Relational Databases with Nulls and Bounded Domains

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Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11695))

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Abstract

Missing data value is an extensive problem in both research and industrial developers. Two general approaches are there to deal with the problem of missing values in databases, they either could be ignored (removed) or imputed (filled in) with new values [10]. For some SQL tables it is possible that some candidate key of the table is not null-free and this needs to be handled. Possible keys and certain keys to deal with this situation were introduced in [17]. In the present paper we introduce an intermediate concept called strongly possible keys that is based on a data mining approach using only information already contained in the SQL table. A strongly possible key is a key that holds for some possible world which is obtained by replacing any occurrences of nulls with some values already appearing in the corresponding attributes. Implication among strongly possible keys is characterized and Armstrong tables are constructed. An algorithm to verify a strongly possible key is given applying bipartite matching. Connection between matroid intersection problem and system of strongly possible keys is established.

Research of the second author was partially supported by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office (NKFIH) grant K–116769. This work is also connected to the scientific program of the “Development of quality-oriented and harmonized R+D+I strategy and functional model at BME” project, supported by the New Hungary Development Plan (Project ID: TÁMOP 4.2.1/B-09/1/KMR-2010-0002).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Information Theory, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary

    Munqath Alattar & Attila Sali

  2. Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

    Attila Sali

Authors
  1. Munqath Alattar
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  2. Attila Sali
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Attila Sali .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia

    Tatjana Welzer

  2. Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria

    Johann Eder

  3. University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia

    Vili Podgorelec

  4. University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia

    Aida Kamišalić Latifić

A Appendix

A Appendix

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Alattar, M., Sali, A. (2019). Keys in Relational Databases with Nulls and Bounded Domains. In: Welzer, T., Eder, J., Podgorelec, V., Kamišalić Latifić, A. (eds) Advances in Databases and Information Systems. ADBIS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11695. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28730-6_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28730-6_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-28729-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-28730-6

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