Normal Forms
Learning about the different types of normal forms and their importance in database design.
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Imagine we’re building an OnlineStore database from scratch and decide to place all order information into a single, massive table.
This table includes columns for the order ID, order date, customer name, customer address, product ID, product name, quantity, and product price. At first glance, this setup appears straightforward. But consider what happens if a customer changes their address—we’d have to locate and update every order record for that customer.
Or what if we want to add a new product that hasn’t been ordered yet?
We can’t, because there’s no existing order to attach it to. This messy situation is exactly what database normalization helps us avoid. Normalization is the process of organizing data to reduce redundancy and maintain data integrity, making our database more efficient, reliable, and scalable.
By the end of this lesson, we will be able to:
Define normalization and explain its importance in database design.
Understand and identify violations of the First Normal Form (1NF).
Understand and identify violations of the Second Normal Form (2NF).
Understand and identify violations of the Third Normal Form (3NF).
Apply normalization rules to transform messy tables into a well-structured database schema.
Normalization
Normalization is a systematic approach to decomposing tables to eliminate data redundancy (repetition) and undesirable characteristics known as insertion, update, and deletion anomalies.
Think of it as a set of rules or guidelines for organizing your data. The goal is to ensure that data is stored logically, with each piece of information saved in only one place. This process involves dividing a large, problematic table into smaller, well-structured tables and defining relationships between them. ...