Re: Who first (publicly) asserted 3NF is "good enough"?

> It has always seemed to me that nothing looks more
> obviously and intuitively wrong than a table that is in
> third normal form (3NF) but not also 4NF. Furthermore I
> rarely see violations of 4NF "in the wild" in databases
> intended to support core business transaction processing
> (as opposed to say DBs for decision support or data
> warehousing). This makes me think even ill-informed
> database designers can immediately spot the problem and
> avoid it even if they don't know what it's called.
>
> Assuming I'm right about the above it is baffling that one
> so frequently sees books and articles in which it is
> asserted that 3NF is "good enough". I assume the authors
> don't actually know what 4NF (and 5NF) is and they are
> quoting and re-quoting some original source that gave them
> permission to ignore 4NF etc.
>
> It's probably far too late to get a confident answer now,
> but does anyone know if there was a single authoritative
> writer (long ago) who expressed this foolish idea?
>
> Roy
>
A good question! Another question as a followup. Have you actually seen a 3NF model in production? Or have you only seen it as the logical represenation of a physical database?  I'm still waiting to find a database in 3NF. Apparently 3NF isn't good enough. Received on Tue Sep 19 2006 - 05:00:04 CEST