Database Normalization

Paper Summary:

This paper thoroughly explains database normalization and views it as a series of steps designed to deal with ways in which tables can be more complicated than necessary. The paper contends that the purpose of normalization is to reduce the chances for anomalies to occur in a database.

From the Paper:

"In 1970, Dr. E.F. Codd's seminal paper "A Relational Model for Large Shared Databanks" was published in Communications of the ACM. This paper introduced the topic of data normalization, so-named because, at the time, President Nixon was normalizing relations with China. (Date, 1990)"
At first glance, Database normalization seems fairly simple. It's a technique used to ensure that there is only one way to know a fact. This is done by removing all structures that prove more than one way to know the same fact as represented in a database relation table. So, the goal of database normalization is to control and eliminate redundancy. One of the more complicated topics in the area of database management is the process of normalizing the tables in a relational database."

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