Contributions to Logical Database Design

This paper treats the problems arising at the stage of logical database design. It comprises a synthesis of the most common inference models of functional dependencies, deals with the problems of building covers for sets of functional dependencies, makes a synthesizes of normal forms, presents trends regarding normalization algorithms and provides a temporal complexity of those. In addition, it presents a summary of the most known keys’ search algorithms, deals with issues of analysis and testing of relational schemes. It also summarizes and compares the different features of recognition of acyclic database schemas.