CHAPTER 4The Normalization Process
The Atomic Age is here to stay—but are we?
—Bennett Cerf
Normalization is the process of taking the entities and attributes that have been discovered and making them suitable for the relational database system. The process does this by removing redundancies and shaping the data in the manner that the relational engine desires to work with it. Once you are done with the process, working with the data will be more natural using the set-based SQL language.
In computer science terms, atomic means that the value cannot (or more reasonably should not) be broken down into smaller parts. If you want to get technical, most any value can be broken down into smaller parts. For the database definition, consider atomic ...
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