Functional dependency in DBMS

The attributes of a table is said to be dependent on each other when an attribute of a table uniquely identifies another attribute of the same table.

For example: Suppose we have a student table with attributes: Stu_Id, Stu_Name, Stu_Age. Here Stu_Id attribute uniquely identifies the Stu_Name attribute of student table because if we know the student id we can tell the student name associated with it. This is known as functional dependency and can be written as Stu_Id->Stu_Name or in words we can say Stu_Name is functionally dependent on Stu_Id.

Formally:
If column A of a table uniquely identifies the column B of same table then it can represented as A->B (Attribute B is functionally dependent on attribute A)

Types of Functional Dependencies

• Trivial functional dependency
• non-trivial functional dependency
• Multivalued dependency
• Transitive dependency