Relational Table

AKA: Relational Database Table.
Context:
- It can be a member of a Relational Database.
- It can have a Primary Key Attribute.
- It can have a Foreign Key Attribute.
- It can have a Record Attributes (that apply to every Relational Data Record).
- It can represent a Concept Class.
- It can range from being a normalized relational table to being an unnormalized relational table.
Example(s):
- An Entity Table, such as: Person Table, Location Table, Citation Table, Product Table, Protein Table.
- a Hive Database Table.
- …
Counter-Example(s):
- an XML Dataset.
- an Array Dataset, because it is not in a relation with another relational table.
See: Set Relation, Propositional Formula, Data Attribute Value.

References

http://www.sqlstrings.com/Database-Glossary.htm
- A Table in RDBMS refers to data arranged in rows and columns, which defines a database entity.
(Wikipedia, 2009) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute-value_system
- An attribute-value system is a basic knowledge representation framework comprising a table with columns designating "attributes" (also known as "properties", "predicates," "features," "dimensions," "characteristics" or "independent variables" depending on the context) and rows designating "objects" (also known as "entities," "instances," "exemplars," "elements" or "dependent variables"). Each table cell therefore designates the value (also known as "state") of a particular attribute of a particular object.

(Makinouchi, 1977) ⇒ Akifumi Makinouchi. (1977). “A Consideration on Normal Form of Not-Necessarily-Normalized Relation in the Relational Data Model.” In: Proceedings of the third International Conference on Very large data bases (VLDB 1977).
- Mathematically, a relation is defined as follows: Given sets [math]\displaystyle{ D_1, D_2, ..., D_n }[/math], (not necessarily distinct), [math]\displaystyle{ R }[/math] is a relation on these [math]\displaystyle{ n }[/math] sets if it is a set of n-tuples ([math]\displaystyle{ d_1, d_2, ..., d_n }[/math]) such that [math]\displaystyle{ d_i }[/math] belongs to [math]\displaystyle{ D_i }[/math], where [math]\displaystyle{ i=l, 2, ..., n }[/math]. [math]\displaystyle{ D_1, D_2, ..., D_n }[/math] are domains of [math]\displaystyle{ R }[/math]. In the realm of relational data model, a relation as above looks like a table (array) each of whose columns has different names. In the sequel, we use tables and relations interchangeably, but domains and columns differently. Each column name of a relation represents a role name in the relation and its domain is a set of values which may possibly be inserted into the column. Each row of the relation consists of an n-tuple of values.