Beginning Database Design

CHAPTER 8Normalization

We are doing pretty well at designing a database. So far, you have learned how use cases and a data model can help you understand many of the complexities of the actual problem you are trying to represent. In the previous chapter, you saw how to represent the main parts of the data model in a relational database. To recap:

• Each class is represented by a table.
• Each object becomes a row in a table.
• For each table, we determine a primary key, which is a field(s) that uniquely identifies each row.
• We use the primary key field(s) to represent relationships between tables by way of foreign keys.

At this stage, everything could be absolutely fine, but then again there may be some classes in our model (or tables in our database) ...