Synthesizing third normal form relations from functional dependencies

Abstract

It has been proposed that the description of a relational database can be formulated as a set of functional relationships among database attributes. These functional relationships can then be used to synthesize algorithmically a relational scheme. It is the purpose of this paper to present an effective procedure for performing such a synthesis. The schema that results from this procedure is proved to be in Codd's third normal form and to contain the fewest possible number of relations. Problems with earlier attempts to construct such a procedure are also discussed.