superkey and candidate kay

A superkey is defined as a set of attributes of a relation for which it holds that in all relations assigned to that variable there are no two distinct tuples (rows) that have the same values for the attributes in this set.
As an example

Code:

+-------------+------------+------------+
| Roll Number | First Name | Last Name  |
+-------------+------------+------------+
| CSU0001     | Shabbir    | Bhimani    |
| CSU0002     | SomeName   | SurName    |
| CSU0003     | Larry      | page       |
+-------------+------------+------------+

Now here we have the following as super keys

1. Roll Number | First Name
2. Roll Number | First Name | Last Name

Now in plain language Any Unique key with some Non Unique key combination is called a super key of the relationship.

A candidate key of a relationship is a set of attributes of that relationship such that there are no two distinct tuples with the same values for these attributes. In simple example candidate key is a minimal superkey, i.e. a superkey of which no proper subset is also a superkey.

Since a relation is a set(no duplicate elements), it holds that every relation will have at least one candidate key (because the entire heading is always a superkey). For practical reasons RDBMSs usually require that for each relation one of its candidate keys is declared as the primary key

 

Unique key is also a super key but the minimal super key is called candidate key and all candidate keys are super keys but the reverse is not true.

 

Its couple of years old thread but anyway.

We can have multiple super keys but not multiple primary keys.

As an example we have userid which is primary key but email and username are also unique for any user and so they are also super keys