Multivalued Dependency

• Multivalued dependency occurs when two attributes in a table are independent of each other but, both depend on a third attribute.
• A multivalued dependency consists of at least two attributes that are dependent on a third attribute that's why it always requires at least three attributes.

Example: Suppose there is a bike manufacturer company which produces two colors(white and black) of each model every year.

Here columns COLOR and MANUF_YEAR are dependent on BIKE_MODEL and independent of each other.

In this case, these two columns can be called as multivalued dependent on BIKE_MODEL. The representation of these dependencies is shown below:

This can be read as "BIKE_MODEL multidetermined MANUF_YEAR" and "BIKE_MODEL multidetermined COLOR".