Multivalued dependencies as inference rules on a deductive process under arelational data model set-theory approach

A set-theoretic interpretation of the relational model was proposed by Spyr atos and Lecluse [17]. It is also contended [16] that multivalued dependenc ies (mvd) can be treated as inference rules. In this paper multivalued depe ndencies are treated as inference rules rather than as integrity constraint s, and an Extended Query Model for deductive query answering is given. The Extended Query Model is considered as an extension of the Query Model [18] because it also includes multivalued dependencies treated as inference rule s. The old query model considers only functional dependencies. They are ana lyzed to establish how they affect query processing in relational databases .