Re: A Normalization Question

> Sure, you can represent it that way, even in the relational model,

Yes, it is one way to eliminate the redundant string 'brown' in RM, although it may not be practical, especially when carried down to symbols as in XDb1.

> but you cannot call it normalization because normalization deals with removing
> logical redundancies and there were no logical redundancies in the
> original relation to begin with. I know you keep on denying this but
> that's what the definition of logical redundancy says.

The reason the redundant string 'brown' doesn't qualify for normalization in RM is because RM's scope/definitions/standards are limited. RM's definitions don't allow one to see that there are three redundant strings because RM only looks for redundancy across a relation/tuple, but the redundany is not at that level, it is at a lower level. The redundancy is in the values of the following tuple:

ID Person Color Street
1 brown brown brown

One only needs to look at the above tuple to see 'brown' is redundant. One can become blind to this obvious fact by seeing things through a limited data model. Received on Tue Jul 13 2004 - 19:03:21 CEST