Discovery of data dependencies in relational databases

Abstract

Knowledge discovery in databases is not only the nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown and potentially useful information from databases. We argue that in contrast to machine learning, knowledge discovery in databases should be applied to real world databases. Since real world databases are known to be very large, they raise problems of the access. Therefore, real world databases only can be accessed by database management systems and the number of accesses has to be reduced to a minimum. Considering this property, we are forced to use, for example, standard set oriented interfaces of relational database management systems in order to apply methods of knowledge discovery in databases. We present a system for discovering data dependencies, which is build upon a set oriented interface. The point of main effort has been put on the discovery of value restrictions, unary inclusion- and functional dependencies in relational databases. The system also embodies an inference relation to minimize database access.