Database Systems: Concepts, Design and Applications

9.1. Introduction

As explained in the earlier chapters, the purpose of database design is to arrange the corporate data fields into an organised structure such that it generates set of relationships and stores information without unnecessary redundancy. In fact, the redundancy and database consistency are the most important logical criteria in database design. A bad database design may result into repetitive data and information and an inability to represent desired information. It is, therefore, important to examine the relationships that exist among the data of an entity to refine the database design.

In this chapter, functional dependencies and decomposition concepts have been discussed to achieve the minimum redundancy without compromising ...