Hey, I got a question for our academics. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing... I was asked by a client about normalization. The client knows there are five normal forms. I told him his data was in 3rd normal form - and that was perfect for his app. He wants to know what it would take to get the data into a higher form. I told him that higher forms are mostly academic exercises, but don't have anything non-technical to prove my point. Either of you have any less technical references on normalization I could refer him to...
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Hmm, to quote Jaws:
Hurls mode on!
Some sources that may help. Not a clear statement though in any of them. In my experience goinging past 3NF is very uncommon, usually because of performance tradeoffs, compleixty to implement (number tables/sql statement complexity, joins etc.), difficulty of people later maintaining to fully comprehend, and that the structing/normalising of 4NF & 5NF is driven by bsuiness rules that may be more volatile.
http://www.datawarehouse.com/iknowledge/articles/article.cfm?ContentID=3564
http://prestwood.com/community/database/info/normalize.html
http://www.agiledata.org/essays/dataModeling101.html
http://www.midrangeserver.com/mpo/mpo091103-story02.html
This one should be familiar!
http://learn.elementk.com/CourseCatalog/course_syllabus.asp?CourseID=1885&CourseType=21
Hurls Mode Off!!!
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