Finding Candidate Keys For Relational Data Bases

Summary: New dependency-based method to enumerate all candidate keys of a normalized relation, avoiding Boolean functions. Uses an implication matrix with its transitive closure and a systematic attribute-adding procedure; suitable for hand calculation and computer implementation, offering an alternative to prime-implicant approaches. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 2084
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 1975
Pagerank: 5.3761846e-05
Overall Rank: 8,651 | 40.85%
DOI: 10.1145/500080.500109

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Raymond Fadous (Michigan State University)
2. John Forsyth (Michigan State University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{fadous_sigmod75,
        title = {{FINDING CANDIDATE KEYS FOR RELATIONAL DATA BASES}},
        author = {Fadous, Raymond and Forsyth, John},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '75},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/500080.500109},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/500080.500109},
        year = {1975}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
8,119	Hitting Set Enumeration with Partial Information for Unique Column Combination Discovery	2020	VLDB	5.46934e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 0 of 0 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

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