Concepts of Database Design and Management

[ArticleBot]

This is a dedicated thread for discussing the SitePoint article 'Concepts of Database Design and Management'

[anupam majumdar]

Good one.But should contain more examples and detailed descriptions for the non-database people.

[Ashish Mehta]

This is great for beginner, All normal forms are well explained with easy examples that will help a lot to freshers, But it needs to be more elaborated for experienced.

[Pootsy]

Great article. Good overview of normalization to 4NF. However most would say that 3NF is the practical limit for most databases, is this true?

[Jon Sherrill]

>Pootsy

No, although 4NF might be (there are more). I read of a beautiful summary of the first three levels of normalization:

Everything must depend on the primary key (1nf) the whole primary key (2nf) and nothing but the primary key (3nf).

The 4nf just makes the common-sense requirement that a table should only model one conceptual relationship, which if you're a programmer is fairly obvious anyway. Think of what your program wants to access, modify, and delete as a block, and you'll have a pretty good idea of what the columns should look like for a single table. A program isn't normally going to want a professor students and committees at the same time.

[Gary]

You jumped into the terminology '1nf, 2nf etc without saying what the heck they mean