The natural join and the inner union combine in different ways tables of a relational database. Tropashko [18] observed that these two operations are the meet and join in a class of lattices—called the relational lattices—and proposed lattice theory as an alternative algebraic approach to databases. Aiming at query optimization, Litak et al. [12] initiated the study of the equational theory of these lattices. We carry on with this project, making use of the duality theory developed in [16]. The contributions of this paper are as follows. Let A be a set of column’s names and D be a set of cell values; we characterize the dual space of the relational lattice $\mathsf {R}(D,A)$ by means of a generalized ultrametric space, whose elements are the functions from  A  to  D , with the  P ( A )-valued distance being the Hamming one but lifted to subsets of  A . We use the dual space to present an equational axiomatization of these lattices that reflects the combinatorial properties of these generalized ultrametric spaces: symmetry and pairwise completeness. Finally, we argue that these equations correspond to combinatorial properties of the dual spaces of lattices, in a technical sense analogous of correspondence theory in modal logic. In particular, this leads to an exact characterization of the finite lattices satisfying these equations.
['Luigi Santocanale']
Relational lattices via duality