Decomposition of a Relation Scheme
Suppose that relation R contains attributes A1 ... An. A decomposition of R consists of replacing R by two or more relations such that:
- Each new relation scheme contains a proper subset of the attributes of R (and no attributes not in R) and
- Every attribute of R appears as an attribute of one of the new relations.
Intuitively, decomposing R means we will store instances of the relation schemes produced by the decomposition, instead of instances of R.