Chapters 5 and 6 provided the tools for data modeling, a fundamental skill for database development. You learned about the notation used in entity relationship diagrams, important data modeling patterns, guidelines to avoid common modeling errors, and conversion of entity relationship diagrams (ERDs) into relational tables. You applied this knowledge to construct ERDs for small, narrative problems. This chapter extends your database design skills by presenting normalization techniques to remove redundancy in relational tables.
Redundancies can cause insert, update, and delete operations to produce unexpected side effects known as modification anomalies. This chapter prescribes normalization techniques to remove modification anomalies caused by redundancies. You will learn about functional dependencies, several normal forms, and a procedure to generate tables without redundancies. In addition, you will learn how to analyze M-way relationships for redundancies. This chapter concludes by briefly presenting additional normal forms and discussing the usefulness and limitations of normalization techniques in the database development process.
