Designing/creating Relational Databases
Adam Brazier
Cornell Center for Advanced Computing
8/2022 (original)
Every relational database starts with a design. Database normalization is how the relational model drives database design, achieving flexibility and protecting against anomalies which would produce inconsistencies in the database.
Objectives
After you complete this segment, you should be able to:
- Normalize a database to third normal form (3NF)
- Make informed decisions about denormalization, if required
Prerequisites
There are no particular prerequisites for learning denormalization. However, if one wishes to design and create a database, you will need:
- A relational database management system (RDBMS) on which you have permissions to create new databases
- A dataset to drive the database design