On Redundancy vs Dependency Preservation in Normalization: An Information-Theoretic Study of 3NF

Summary: Propose an information-theoretic "price of dependency preservation" (in [0,1]) measuring redundancy added to preserve FDs; prove any dependency-preserving normal form has price ≥ 1/2. Show 3NF attains price = 1/2 (optimal), and unnormalized schemas incur ≥2× the redundancy of 3NF. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 1383
Venue: PODS
Year: 2006
Pagerank: 4.1945683e-05
Overall Rank: 12,486 | 13.14%
DOI: -

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Authors

1. Solmaz Kolahi
2. Leonid Libkin

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

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Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
302	Relative Information Capacity of Simple Relational Database Schemata	1984	PODS	0.00028316973
450	The Theory Of Probabilistic Databases	1987	VLDB	0.00022822073
1,803	A Normal Form for XML Documents	2002	PODS	0.00010504331
1,884	Normal forms and relational database operators	1979	SIGMOD	0.00010215563
3,240	Information Dependencies	2000	PODS	7.3316755e-05
3,420	An Information-Theoretic Approach to Normal Forms for Relational and XML Data	2003	PODS	7.1154446e-05
4,010	A Web Odyssey: from Codd to XML	2001	PODS	6.5351699e-05
5,697	Conjunctive Query Equivalence of Keyed Relational Schemas (Extended Abstract)	1997	PODS	5.3671336e-05

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