Summary

Normalization is a set of techniques for organizing data into tables in such a way as to eliminate certain types of redundancy and incompleteness, and associated complexity and/or anomalies when updating it.

This chapter covered normalization to third normal form (3NF). There are higher normal forms, but in most cases model in third normal form already is in fifth normal form. In this chapter, we use top-down approach as a way to show process of normalization in a practical way. As already stated in Introduction, the main audience for this tutorial is a beginner developer - an experienced developer usually doesn't start with modeling in this manner - he usually from the beginning start with model which is similar to model shown in 3NF sub-chapter - normalized model, and then fine tune model - introduce some redundancy if it is needed for better performances of system etc.