I won\u2019t try to kid you. I love this subject. When you finally see the power and simplicity of it all, it is like a 200 watt halogen light bulb going off over your head in a cavern where you previously only had one of those little led lights on a key chain. In fact, it is the simplicity of normalization that makes it so much fun. Of course, knowledge of normalization isn\u2019t the only thing that makes you a good database designer and realistically, most people do some level of normalization without even knowing it. I dare you to find a database that has only one table with one column that expresses more than one concept. Even a newbie with an excel workbook will start to add worksheets as it becomes more difficult to manage their data in that workbook. However, understanding why you do that natural process is half of the battle.<\/p>\n
The approach I will take in this chapter is to break down things into 4 major sections:<\/p>\n
One of my desires in each edition of the book is to tackle the higher normal forms in more and better manners that a person like me can understand. I am pretty thick at times, and a lot of concepts just go beyond me in their mathematical notation laden versions. Not that I am against that sort of thing, it is just that I don\u2019t really get it until I get a simplistic example to follow. And even worse, too many writers gloss over the details of complex topics by simply puking up the wording from the original writer and moving along, not even giving examples. I feel that if you are going to bring up a topic, you cover it, give examples, and explain it. It isn\u2019t always practical and often I wish I didn\u2019t feel that way (and I wish my editors didn\u2019t feel that way too.)<\/p>\n
In this edition, I am going to be changing up a bit of my material on First and Fourth, and Fifth Normal forms (moving some of the non-key multi-valued dependencies stuff to first normal form, since really what I describe there is technically first normal form\u2019s requirement to have single valued attributes, though I have seen it described in multiple places as fourth\u2026Again, kind of confusing). <\/p>\n