An Introduction to Database Normalization

excellent article!
May I translate it to chinese?

Great article. It's nice to see a simple and clear introduction to database normalization. Most of them get too complex too quick.
Look forward to the next installment.

brian

great. glad you liked it! stay tuned for more fun with db normalization.

wj

THANKS FOR THE EXCELLENT INFORMATION

good article but when i was looking through the mysql documintation about foreign keys it saya the it doesn't support the foreign key constraint. how then do you normalize in mysql?
Jon

Good question.

Of course, Foreign Keys are an important part of db normalization. While you are correct that MySQL does not explicitly support Foreign Keys, it still does support Foreign Key syntax for portability reasons. Of course, the ability to automatically verify Foreign Key constraints is advantageous; However, this is not without some tradeoff with performance.

I delve into this matter in the second article in the series, soon to be published on Devshed.

/wj

Great article. But what about BCNF, 4NF and 5NF? Also, the introduction page does not give the reader a feel for the content, although it does set the content in context. Also, Oracle examples are more transferable.

Sorry - there are no code examples - I am reading too many articles at once.

If you read the conclusion, I state that there are in fact other Normal Forms (hence BCNF, 4NF, 5NF). However, for most purposes, the first 3 Normal Forms are more than suffice to normalize.

If anyone is interested in learning more about the other Normal Forms, please email me and I'll be happy to provide links to online resources.

wj

Seriously, this is a good article for people who need to learn relational database design. I feel a great urge to send this to all the people I know that like to build databases using absolutely no common sense... That said, a better title for the story would have been "An Introduction to Relational Database Design" or something akin to that... Normalization gave me the impression I was about to read up on how to make sure my tables don't get corrupted... oh well, maybe that's just me.

Hi

I agree that a change of title would make it more palatable for the intended audience. When I forwarded it to a friend, I had to justify its title being more complicated than their level.

A good article-some more horizontal and vertical business applications and tables are required to be addressed.These will also provide additional examples

i am just getting into databases and this was well written and made a lot of things clear thank you for taking the time to write

Allthough I new the stuff presented in your article I really liked the way it was presented.
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If any of my friends to learn about databases I will surely hook them up to this article.
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Thomas
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ps. Looking forward to read more articles from you :c)
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I liked the article... the Information Science field in general makes me like that...