Normalization is an important part of database design. Research and comment on Normalization and any experience that you may have had with this technique.
The concept of improving a database through normalization revolves around the ideas of efficiency and relationship building. Normalization improves design and is widely used. Two goals exist in this pursuit; they are “eliminating redundant data…and ensuring dependencies make sense (only storing related data in a table)” (Chapple, 2013). Redundancies take up unnecessary space and are a waste of time. Normalization involves breaking up large sets of data and creating multiple tables with data based upon a similar theme. During this process “some attributes are extracted from one table to form a new one” and connections are made (Janert, 2003). There are degrees of which a database table has been normalized; these are called normal forms and they are denoted by 1NF, 2NF, 3NF, Boyce-Codd (BCNF), 4NF, and 5NF. The increase in number addresses the level of increased normalization and each level is dependent on the one before in minimizing anomalies. 1NF’s goal is to get rid of duplicates while making “separate tables for each group of related data and identify each row with a unique column” (Chapple, 2013). The ones following 1NF (2NF, 3NF, and BCNF) all “address one-to-one and one-to-many relationships” (Janert, 2003). Tables are connected in these processes and non-essential columns minimized. Once a table has
