Combining Data from Different Tables

An important part of designing a relational database is deciding how to divide data into different tables. We imagined a CD collection that we originally organized on index cards, one card per CD, which we wanted to put in a database. To do this, we created one table to hold information that applied to the CD as a whole and another table for information about the songs. We called the process of finding relationships and creating tables to model the data with minimal redundancy normalization. We found that this process leads to multiple small tables. An important consequence of this is that, in order to use the data, create reports, or perform analyses—or, in our example, to recreate the information that was ...

Get Java™ Oracle® Database Development now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.