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# Armstrong's axioms

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 Title: Armstrong's axioms Author: World Heritage Encyclopedia Language: English Subject: Collection: Data Modeling Publisher: World Heritage Encyclopedia Publication Date:

### Armstrong's axioms

Armstrong's axioms are a set of axioms (or, more precisely, inference rules) used to infer all the functional dependencies on a relational database. They were developed by William W. Armstrong on his 1974 paper.[1] The axioms are sound in generating only functional dependencies in the closure of a set of functional dependencies (denoted as F^{+}) when applied to that set (denoted as F). They are also complete in that repeated application of these rules will generate all functional dependencies in the closure F^+.

More formally, let \langle R(U), F \rangle denote a relational scheme over the set of attributes U with a set of functional dependencies F. We say that a functional dependency f is logically implied by F,and denote it with F \models f if and only if for every instance r of R that satisfies the functional dependencies in F, r also satisfies f. We denote by F^{+} the set of all functional dependencies that are logically implied by F.

Furthermore, with respect to a set of inference rules A, we say that a functional dependency f is derivable from the functional dependencies in F by the set of inference rules A, and we denote it by F \vdash _{A} f if and only if f is obtainable by means of repeatedly applying the inference rules in A to functional dependencies in F. We denote by F^{*}_{A} the set of all functional dependencies that are derivable from F by inference rules in A.

Then, a set of inference rules A is sound if and only if the following holds:

F^{*}_{A} \subseteq F^{+}

that is to say, we cannot derive by means of A functional dependencies that are not logically implied by F. The set of inference rules A is said to be complete if the following holds:

F^{+} \subseteq F^{*}_{A}

more simply put, we are able to derive by A all the functional dependencies that are logically implied by F.

## Contents

• Axioms 1
• Axiom of reflexivity 1.1
• Axiom of augmentation 1.2
• Axiom of transitivity 1.3
• Additional rules 2
• Union 2.1
• Decomposition 2.2
• Pseudo transitivity 2.3
• Armstrong relation 3
• External links 4
• References 5

## Axioms

Let R(U) be a relation scheme over the set of attributes U. Henceforth we will denote by letters X, Y, Z any subset of U and, for short, the union of two sets of attributes X and Y by XY instead of the usual X \cup Y; this notation is rather standard in database theory when dealing with sets of attributes.

### Axiom of reflexivity

If Y \subseteq X then X \to Y

### Axiom of augmentation

If X \to Y, then X Z \to Y Z for any Z

### Axiom of transitivity

If X \to Y and Y \to Z, then X \to Z

## Additional rules

These rules can be derived from above axioms.

### Union

If X \to Y and X \to Z then X \to YZ

### Decomposition

If X \to YZ then X \to Y and X \to Z

### Pseudo transitivity

If X \to Y and YZ \to W then XZ\to W

## Armstrong relation

Given a set of functional dependencies F, the Armstrong relation is a relation which satisfies all the functional dependencies in the closure F^+ and only those dependencies. Unfortunately, the minimum-size Armstrong relation for a given set of dependencies can have a size which is an exponential function of the number of attributes in the dependencies considered.[2]

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