Discovering Multi-Table Functional Dependencies Without Full Join Computation

In this paper, we study the problem of discovering join FDs, i.e., functional dependencies (FDs) that hold on multiple joined tables. We leverage logical inference, selective mining, and sampling and show that we can discover most of the exact join FDs from the single tables participating to the join and avoid the full computation of the join result. We propose algorithms to speed-up the join FD discovery process and mine FDs on the fly only from necessary data partitions. We introduce JEDI (Join dEpendency DIscovery), our solution to discover join FDs without computation of the full join beforehand. Our experiments on a range of real-world and synthetic data demonstrate the benefits of our method over existing FD discovery methods that need to precompute the join results before discovering the FDs. We show that the performance depends on the cardinalities and coverage of the join attribute values: for join operations with low coverage, JEDI with selective mining outperforms the competing methods using the straightforward approach of full join computation by one order of magnitude in terms of runtime and can discover three-quarters of the exact join FDs using mainly logical inference in half of its total execution time on average. For higher join coverage, JEDI with sampling reaches precision of 1 with only 63% of the table input size on average.