Applied Mathematics for Database Professionals

In Chapter 6 you were introduced to tuple, table, and database predicates. These predicates deal with data in an increasing scope order: attribute values within a single tuple, tuples within a single table, and tables within a single database state.

The section “More Data Integrity Predicates” continues down this path of increasing scope by introducing the concept of a state transition predicate. A state transition predicate deals with a pair of database states that are referred to as the begin state and the end state. We’ll use state transition predicates to define the admissible database state transitions (otherwise known as transactions) for ...