A Review on Mining Functional Dependencies in Database

摘要

Determination of functional dependencies is an important part of designing databases in relational data model, and in the process of database normalization and denormalization. It is a fundamental activity in the database design recovery process and important in knowledge discovery, database semantics analysis, database design, and data quality assessment. Under the circumstance of semantics unknown or data relationship difficult to be defined, the problem faced is, how to mine all possible full functional dependency behind datum. This paper reviews the different methods for discovering functional dependency in relational databases. It will provide an overview to four top-down search approaches for mining functional dependencies. Every system reviewed has some minor functionality flaws, like handling large attribute sets, handling attributes with no equivalences among them. So a new system that combines the features of the reviewed system can be devised so as to overcome these problems.