Normal forms and all that jazz: A database professional’s guide to the theory of database design
by Chris Date
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Description
How many of these questions can you answer?
- What's the difference between 3NF and BCNF?
- Is it true that if a table has just two columns, then it's in 4NF?
- Is it true that if a table has just one key and just one other column, then it's in 5NF?
- Is it true that if a table is in BCNF but not 5NF, then it must be all key?
- Is it true that 5NF tables are redundancy free?
- What precisely is denormalization?
As you can see, these questions all have to do with normalization and normal forms. Normal forms are important, of course, but there's much more to database design theory than just normal forms as such. Here are some more questions:
- What's Heath's Theorem, and why is it important?
- What's The Principle of Orthogonal Design?
- What makes some JDs reducible and others irreducible?
- What's dependency preservation, and why is it important?
- Should data redundancy always be avoided? Can it be?
- What's the chase?
Attend this seminar, then, and learn the answers to questions like those above, as well as much, much more.
Main Topics
- Popular misconceptions
- The place of design theory
- Functional dependencies (informal and formal)
- Boyce/Codd normal form (informal and formal)
- Preserving dependencies
- FD axiomatization
- Join dependencies (informal and formal)
- Fifth normal form (informal and formal)
- Implicit dependencies
- The chase
- Multivalued dependencies
- MVD axiomatization
- Fourth normal form
- Sixth normal form
- Other normal forms
- Principles of normalization
- Objectives of normalization
- Why normalization is not a panacea
- The Principle of Orthogonal Design
- Orthogonality vs. normalization
- What is redundancy?
- Kinds of redundancy
- Dealing with redundancy