Functional Dependency

The functional dependency is a relationship that exists between two attributes. It typically exists between the primary key and non-key attribute within a table.

The left side of FD is known as a determinant, the right side of the production is known as a dependent.

For example:

Assume we have an employee table with attributes: Emp_Id, Emp_Name, Emp_Address.

Here Emp_Id attribute can uniquely identify the Emp_Name attribute of employee table because if we know the Emp_Id, we can tell that employee name associated with it.

Functional dependency can be written as:

We can say that Emp_Name is functionally dependent on Emp_Id.

Types of Functional dependency

1. Trivial functional dependency

A → B has trivial functional dependency if B is a subset of A.
The following dependencies are also trivial like: A → A, B → B

Example:

Consider a table with two columns Employee_Id and Employee_Name.
{Employee_id, Employee_Name}   →    Employee_Id is a trivial functional dependency as 
Employee_Id is a subset of {Employee_Id, Employee_Name}.
Also, Employee_Id → Employee_Id and Employee_Name   →    Employee_Name are trivial dependencies too.