Re: Normalization by Composing, not just Decomposing

"Alan" <alan_at_erols.com> wrote in message news:c54a0e$2ohurg$1_at_ID-114862.news.uni-berlin.de...
> You are assuming that (good) normalization is a science. It is not. It is
> part science and part art- that's where experience (as well as ESP to read
> the user's minds and clairvoiance to predict future needs) comes in to
play.
> Oh, it is also part voodoo. Sometimes waving a dead chicken in a paper bag
> over your head produces the results you need.

It might not be science, but it's at least a discipline based on logic (specifically functional dependencies). It's always going to require interpretation with respect to the domain being modeled, because we're trying to model part of reality, which is messy, in such a way that we (and computers) can extract meaningful data, which requires clarity.

That's all a far cry from voodoo, unless you're defining voodoo as everything which is not science. And you might be surprised what real science is like...

> By the way, the process of
> putting it back together is called denormalization,

Putting it back together implies that information was lost during normalization, which isn't the case - in fact, the normalized schema doesn't risk data loss (e.g. inconsistency) the way a denormalized schema does.

• erk