Relational Databases for Archaeology Main Menu

Normalization

4
An important strength of the relational database is the ability to store information efficiently.  We call this normalization.  There are two main goals for normalization of your database.  First, we want to prevent any redundancy or duplication in the storage of your data.  Second, we want to minimize the number of fields that are left blank because a particular row will never have a certain type of data.  We examine each of these challenges in the following subsections.

Remember that normalization is a way of thinking about structuring your data.  There is nothing in the software that helps you or prevents you from normalizing your data.  Rather, as you design your tables, that is when you take normalization into consideration.
 

This page has paths:

  1. Relational Databases for Archaeology Peter Cobb

Contents of this path:

  1. Eliminating Redundancies