Database Design and Relational Theory: Normal Forms and All That Jazz

© C. J. Date 2019

C. J. DateDatabase Design and Relational Theoryhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5540-7_1

1. Preliminaries

C. J. Date¹ 

(1)

Healdsburg, California, USA

 

(On being asked what jazz is:)

Man, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know.

—Louis Armstrong (attrib.)

This book has as its subtitle Normal Forms and All That Jazz. Clearly some explanation is needed! First of all, of course, I’m talking about design theory—database design theory, that is—and everybody knows that normal forms are a major component of that theory; hence the first part of the subtitle. But there’s more to that theory than just normal forms, and that fact accounts for that subtitle’s second part. Third, it’s unfortunately the case that—from the practitioner’s point of ...