Lesson 2Applying Normalization
Chapter 1 mentioned that to reduce redundancy and improve efficiency in a relational database, data is typically stored across many different tables, where each table focuses on one kind of data. In this lesson, you will learn the standard process for organizing your data.
WHAT IS NORMALIZATION?
Relational database design has the goal of organizing data in a way that reduces redundant (or duplicate) data while also streamlining ways in which we can access that data.
The relational database model was proposed by E. F. Codd in his article “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks” in the June 1970 issue of Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). Being an academic proposal, it is a bit dry, but the point of this paper was to propose a database model based on relations (tables), accessible via a universal language, and having a defined set of rules for splitting a dataset into relations. In discussing normal form, he notes that relations with simple domains lend themselves to storage in a simple, two‐dimensional array, while other relations are more complex and require correspondingly more complex structures to represent them.
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