Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties, 3rd Edition

2.10. Practical Hints for Normalization

CASE tools implement formal methods for doing normalization. In particular, E-R (entity-relationship) diagrams are very useful for this process. However, a few informal hints can help speed up the process and give you a good start.

Broadly speaking, tables represent either entities or relationships, which is why E-R diagrams work so well as a design tool. Tables that represent entities should have a simple, immediate name suggested by their contents—a table named Students has student data in it, not student data and bowling scores. It is also a good idea to use plural or collective nouns as the names of such tables to remind you that a table is a set of entities; the rows are the single instances of them. ...