December 2002
Beginner
640 pages
16h 41m
English
After your data is modeled into tables, you need to ensure that the tables are truly relational. Far from being just good practice, making your data relational is essential for efficient processing of transactions, good use of storage, and ease of data management. Making a data structure relational is achieved by the process of normalization.
Normalization is probably the most important tool for database designers. It is central to relational database theory and is the key process that translates data models from flat-files to efficient, relational formats.
There are nine rules for normalization, which arise from numerous theories of data modeling. However, in this lesson we'll keep things simple and explain the first three normal ...