RE: Normalization

The best explanation I ever saw was this from Stephen Edelstein
(sedelstein_at_earthlink.net):

</rant>
I hate to get too pedantic about this, but its something that's bugged me for about 15 years, all the time I've been working with Oracle and relational databases. Paul (Dorsey) is right about normalization: it is a specific term that does NOT imply anything but a poor design AT A CERTAIN PHASE OF THE DESIGN PROCESS. Think of it with this adage: The key, the whole key, and nothing but the key: In 1NF, all the columns depend on the primary key (THE KEY); in 2NF, all the columns depend on the WHOLE (ie, compound) primary key (THE WHOLE KEY); in 3NF all the columns depend on nothing but the key, ie, not on each other (NOTHING BUT THE KEY). This is relevant at the level of defining the attributes to an entity. Each attribute MUST conform to these 3 forms, or else they are not normalized. That's as far as normalization goes. There are plenty of other things that make database designs really bad, but if you're talking about normalized tables, you're talking about the relationship betweeen the attributes of a table and the table's primary key. PERIOD.

(And Paul D's example, while anti-intuitive, is probably right in so far
as normalization goes. The problem with it may be in further attributes that define the entity more fully; and in the fact that group by statements would be impossible, since they depend on a value in a column rather than the column name itself: grouping the data would require a decode statement and thus be dependent on the processing language rather than the sets of the tables.)

</rant off>

Tom Harleman
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ThinkFast CONSULTING, Inc. (formerly Pinnacle Solutions) Technical Consultant
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-----Original Message-----
From: root_at_fatcity.com [mailto:root_at_fatcity.com]On Behalf Of Balasubramanian M
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2000 3:53 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Normalization

Dear all,

Can anyone give some good whitepapers or URL site about Normalization ? Any kind of help is highly appreciated.

Regards,
Bala

--
Author: Balasubramanian M
  INET: sbala_at_hclinsys.com

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