Normal forms and relational database operators

Summary: Defines projection-join normal form (PJ/NF) as the ultimate NF when only projection and join are allowed. Cites Aho–Beeri–Ullman: a schema decomposable into three projections need not arise from cascading two-projection decompositions; 4NF may fail PJ/NF, with unions discussed. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h1cc2b2e087f020ef
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 1979
Pagerank: 8.4163872e-05
Overall Rank: 2,470 | 83.40%
DOI: 10.1145/582095.582120

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Ronald Fagin (IBM)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{fagin_sigmod79,
        title = {{Normal forms and relational database operators}},
        author = {Fagin, Ronald},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '79},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/582095.582120},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/582095.582120},
        year = {1979}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 7 of 7 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,562	Assumptions in Relational Database Theory	1982	PODS	0.00010227324
3,502	An Information-Theoretic Approach to Normal Forms for Relational and XML Data	2003	PODS	7.2525074e-05
6,606	Weak Multivalued Dependencies+	1984	PODS	5.7364017e-05
9,875	Quantifying the Loss of Acyclic Join Dependencies	2023	PODS	5.1176637e-05
9,967	Logical Schema Design that Quantifies Update Inefficiency and Join Efficiency	2021	SIGMOD	5.1038322e-05
12,969	On Redundancy vs Dependency Preservation in Normalization: An Information-Theoretic Study of 3NF	2006	PODS	4.9793485e-05
13,531	A Less Costly Constraints Checking for Join Dependency	1984	VLDB	4.9793485e-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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