DERIVABILITY, REDUNDANCY AND CONSISTENCY OF RELATIONS STORED IN LARGE DATA BANKS

摘要

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.