Relaxing the Universal Relation Scheme Assumption

Summary: Relax the USA via an Association-Object Data Model using representative instances with value-inapplicable nulls. Introduce object dependencies (ODs) and object-defining constraints (ODCs) with complete axiomatizations and a chase-like decision procedure, showing expressiveness beyond join dependencies. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 721
Venue: PODS
Year: 1985
Pagerank: 5.093636e-05
Overall Rank: 13,208 | 9.39%
DOI: 10.1145/325405.325415

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

No non-self incoming citations found for this paper in this database.

Authors

1. Jacob Stein (Oregon Graduate Institute; Servio Logic Development Corp.)
2. David Maier (Oregon Graduate Institute)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{stein_pods85,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '85},
        title = {{Relaxing the Universal Relation Scheme Assumption}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/325405.325415},
        doi = {10.1145/325405.325415},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Stein, Jacob and Maier, David},
        year = {1985}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 0 of 0 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
40	Testing Implications Of Data Dependencies	1979	SIGMOD	0.00046918506
266	Can We Use The Universal Instance Assumption Without Using Nulls?	1981	SIGMOD	0.00022823892
540	Synthesizing Independent Database Schemas	1979	SIGMOD	0.0001686137
3,957	Specifying Connections for a Universal Relation Scheme Database	1982	SIGMOD	6.9945541e-05
4,267	Toward Logical Data Independence: A Relational Query Language without Relations	1982	SIGMOD	6.7929169e-05

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8	3,957	Specifying Connections for a Universal Relation Scheme Database	1982	SIGMOD
9	1,537	Assumptions in Relational Database Theory	1982	PODS
10	266	Can We Use The Universal Instance Assumption Without Using Nulls?	1981	SIGMOD