Knowledge bases contain specific and general knowledge. In relational database systems, specific knowledge is often represented as a set of relations. The conventional methodologies for centralized database design can be applied to develop a normalized, redundancy-free global schema. Distributed database design involves redundancy removal as well as the distribution design which allows replicated data segments. Thus, distribution design can be viewed as a process on a normalized global schema which produces a collection of fragments of relations from a global database. Clearly, not every fragment of data can be permitted as a relation. In this paper, we clarify and formally discuss three kinds of fragmentations of relational databases, and characterize their features as valid designs, and we introduce a hybrid knowledge fragmentation as the general case. For completeness of presentation, we first show an algorithm for the validity test of vertical fragmentations of normalized relations, and then extend it to the more general case of unbiased fragmentations.
A Framework for Creating Global Schema Using Proxy Tables from Distributed Heterogeneous Relational Databases in Multidatabase System
