3-2.2 Proportions of records.

Figure 1 — Proportions of Records

Figure 1 diagrams a file containing Ntotal records. A typical database should contain some records that are unique in the sense that they are the ones that have no other record referring to the same entity. These are the singletons (NS) — one record for each entity. If the whole database were singletons, the duplication rate would be zero. The two ways to look at duplication rate relate to two very different ratios.