Decomposition of a Data Base and the Theory of Boolean Switching Functions

The notion of a functional relation among the attributes of a data set can be fruitfully applied in the structuring of an information system. These relations are meaningful both to the user of the system in his semantic understanding of the data, and to the designer in implementing the system. An important equivalence between operations with functional relations and operations with analogous Boolean functions is demonstrated in this paper. The equivalence is computationally helpful in exploring the properties of a given set of functional relations, as well as in the task of partitioning a data set into subfiles for efficient implementation.