The process of assembling these
logical units of information is called normalization of the database design.
The concept of normalized table design was tailored to the capabilities of the relational
database. Because you could join data from different tables together in a
query, there was no need to keep all the information associated with a particular
object together in a single record. Youcou ld decompose the information into
associated units and simply join the appropriate units together when you needed
information that crossed table boundaries.
There are many different methodologies for normalizing data. The following is one
example:
Normalized Forms
In fact, there is more than one type of normalization. Each step in the normalization
process ends with a specific result called a normalized form. There are five standard
normalized forms, which are referred to as first normal form (1NF), second normal
form (2NF), and so on. The normalization process that we describe briefly in this section
results in third normal form (3NF), the most common type of normalization.
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