Fundamentals of Order Dependencies

Dependencies have played a significant role in database design for many years. They have also been shown to be useful in query optimization. In this paper, we discuss dependencies between lexicographically ordered sets of tuples. We introduce formally the concept of order dependency and present a set of axioms (inference rules) for them. We show how query rewrites based on these axioms can be used for query optimization. We present several interesting theorems that can be derived using the inference rules. We prove that functional dependencies are subsumed by order dependencies and that our set of axioms for order dependencies is sound and complete.