60 Chapter 2 Introduction to the Relational Model

employee (person name, street, city)

works (person name, company name, salary)
company (company name, city)

Figure 2.17 Employee database.

Practice Exercises

2.1 Consider the employee database of Figure 2.17. What are the appropriate pri-
mary keys?
2.2 Consider the foreign-key constraint from the dept name attribute of instructor to
the department relation. Give examples of inserts and deletes to these relations
that can cause a violation of the foreign-key constraint.
2.3 Consider the time slot relation. Given that a particular time slot can meet more
than once in a week, explain why day and start time are part of the primary key
of this relation, while end time is not.
2.4 In the instance of instructor shown in Figure 2.1, no two instructors have the
same name. From this, can we conclude that name can be used as a superkey
(or primary key) of instructor?
2.5 What is the result of first performing the Cartesian product of student and advi-
sor, and then performing a selection operation on the result with the predicate
s id = ID? (Using the symbolic notation of relational algebra, this query can be
written as σs id=ID (student × advisor).)
2.6 Consider the employee database of Figure 2.17. Give an expression in the rela-
tional algebra to express each of the following queries:

a. Find the name of each employee who lives in city “Miami”.

b. Find the name of each employee whose salary is greater than $100000.
c. Find the name of each employee who lives in “Miami” and whose salary
is greater than $100000.

2.7 Consider the bank database of Figure 2.18. Give an expression in the relational
algebra for each of the following queries:

a. Find the name of each branch located in “Chicago”.

b. Find the ID of each borrower who has a loan in branch “Downtown”.
 Practice Exercises 61

branch(branch name, branch city, assets)

customer (ID, customer name, customer street, customer city)
loan (loan number, branch name, amount)
borrower (ID, loan number)
account (account number, branch name, balance)
depositor (ID, account number)

Figure 2.18 Bank database.

2.8 Consider the employee database of Figure 2.17. Give an expression in the rela-
tional algebra to express each of the following queries:

a. Find the ID and name of each employee who does not work for “BigBank”.
b. Find the ID and name of each employee who earns at least as much as
every employee in the database.

2.9 The division operator of relational algebra, “÷”, is defined as follows. Let r(R)
and s(S) be relations, and let S ⊆ R; that is, every attribute of schema S is
also in schema R. Given a tuple t, let t[S] denote the projection of tuple t on
the attributes in S. Then r ÷ s is a relation on schema R − S (that is, on the
schema containing all attributes of schema R that are not in schema S). A tuple
t is in r ÷ s if and only if both of two conditions hold:
• t is in ΠR−S (r)
• For every tuple ts in s, there is a tuple tr in r satisfying both of the following:
a. tr [S] = ts [S]
b. tr [R − S] = t

Given the above definition:

a. Write a relational algebra expression using the division operator to find

the IDs of all students who have taken all Comp. Sci. courses. (Hint:
project takes to just ID and course id, and generate the set of all Comp.
Sci. course ids using a select expression, before doing the division.)
b. Show how to write the above query in relational algebra, without using
division. (By doing so, you would have shown how to define the division
operation using the other relational algebra operations.)
62 Chapter 2 Introduction to the Relational Model

Exercises

2.10 Describe the differences in meaning between the terms relation and relation
schema.
2.11 Consider the advisor relation shown in the schema diagram in Figure 2.9, with
s id as the primary key of advisor. Suppose a student can have more than one
advisor. Then, would s id still be a primary key of the advisor relation? If not,
what should the primary key of advisor be?
2.12 Consider the bank database of Figure 2.18. Assume that branch names and cus-
tomer names uniquely identify branches and customers, but loans and accounts
can be associated with more than one customer.
a. What are the appropriate primary keys?
b. Given your choice of primary keys, identify appropriate foreign keys.
2.13 Construct a schema diagram for the bank database of Figure 2.18.
2.14 Consider the employee database of Figure 2.17. Give an expression in the rela-
tional algebra to express each of the following queries:
a. Find the ID and name of each employee who works for “BigBank”.
b. Find the ID, name, and city of residence of each employee who works for
“BigBank”.
c. Find the ID, name, street address, and city of residence of each employee
who works for “BigBank” and earns more than $10000.
d. Find the ID and name of each employee in this database who lives in the
same city as the company for which she or he works.
2.15 Consider the bank database of Figure 2.18. Give an expression in the relational
algebra for each of the following queries:
a. Find each loan number with a loan amount greater than $10000.
b. Find the ID of each depositor who has an account with a balance greater
than $6000.
c. Find the ID of each depositor who has an account with a balance greater
than $6000 at the “Uptown” branch.
2.16 List two reasons why null values might be introduced into a database.
2.17 Discuss the relative merits of imperative, functional, and declarative languages.
2.18 Write the following queries in relational algebra, using the university schema.
a. Find the ID and name of each instructor in the Physics department.
 Further Reading 63

b. Find the ID and name of each instructor in a department located in the

building “Watson”.
c. Find the ID and name of each student who has taken at least one course
in the “Comp. Sci.” department.
d. Find the ID and name of each student who has taken at least one course
section in the year 2018.
e. Find the ID and name of each student who has not taken any course
section in the year 2018.

Further Reading

E. F. Codd of the IBM San Jose Research Laboratory proposed the relational model
in the late 1960s ([Codd (1970)]). In that paper, Codd also introduced the original
definition of relational algebra. This work led to the prestigious ACM Turing Award to
Codd in 1981 ([Codd (1982)]).
After E. F. Codd introduced the relational model, an expansive theory developed
around the relational model pertaining to schema design and the expressive power of
various relational languages. Several classic texts cover relational database theory, in-
cluding [Maier (1983)] (which is available free, online), and [Abiteboul et al. (1995)].
Codd’s original paper inspired several research projects that were formed in the
mid to late 1970s with the goal of constructing practical relational database systems,
including System R at the IBM San Jose Research Laboratory, Ingres at the University
of California at Berkeley, and Query-by-Example at the IBM T. J. Watson Research
Center. The Oracle database was developed commercially at the same time.
Many relational database products are now commercially available. These include
IBM’s DB2 and Informix, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and Sybase and HANA from
SAP. Popular open-source relational database systems include MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Hive and Spark are widely used systems that support parallel execution of queries
across large numbers of computers.

Bibliography

[Abiteboul et al. (1995)] S. Abiteboul, R. Hull, and V. Vianu, Foundations of Databases, Ad-
dison Wesley (1995).
[Codd (1970)] E. F. Codd, “A Relational Model for Large Shared Data Banks”, Communi-
cations of the ACM, Volume 13, Number 6 (1970), pages 377–387.
[Codd (1982)] E. F. Codd, “The 1981 ACM Turing Award Lecture: Relational Database: A
Practical Foundation for Productivity”, Communications of the ACM, Volume 25, Number 2
(1982), pages 109–117.