Re: Normalization and DBMS

From: Leandro Guimarães Faria Corsetti Dutra <leandro_at_dutra.fastmail.fm>
Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 18:25:19 -0300
Message-ID: <pan.2004.05.11.21.25.17.712587@dutra.fastmail.fm>

Em Tue, 11 May 2004 15:09:12 -0500, Dawn M. Wolthuis escreveu:

> That is the only logic I can find behind 1NF and I have found
> absolutely NO and I mean NO emperical data to suggest that putting
> data into 1NF helps minimize the cost of the system for the long
> haul.

1NF was initially applied to clean our databases of such horrors as:

CREATE TABLE
(
  subject,
  year,
  grade_jan,
  grade_feb,
  ...
)
;

These were known as repeating groups. Now there is a debate about nested tables which I haven't looked into properly. But I do maintain that getting rid of repeating groups is The Right Thing To Do, and one of the reasons why relational is so much better.

Now feel free to trounce me... this post was lousy, I'm too lazy know to do anything formal enough.

-- 
Leandro GuimarÃ£es Faria Corsetti Dutra           +55 (11) 5685 2219
Av Sgto Geraldo Santana, 1100 6/71               +55 (11) 5686 9607
04.674-000  SÃ£o Paulo, SP                                    BRASIL
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Received on Tue May 11 2004 - 16:25:19 CDT