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Relational Algebra

Relational algebra (RA) can be viewed as ...
  • mathematical system for manipulating relations, or
  • data manipulation language (DML) for the relational model
Core relational algebra operations:
  • selection: choosing a subset of rows
  • projection: choosing a subset of columns
  • product, join: combining relations
  • union, intersection, difference: combining relations
  • rename: change names of relations/attributes
Common extensions include:
  • sorting (order by), partition (group by), aggregation