Database Normalization

Database designers go through a great deal of planning to achieve optimal storage and 0:00 performance while generating the desired context for 0:05 the data stored in database tables. 0:09 Designing a relational database in this manner is called normalization. 0:12 During the process of normalization, 0:17 the database schema designer is thinking about the data that is important to 0:19 their business and how best to fit that in to tables. 0:23 They're looking for places where the data would repeat and what values depend on 0:27 one another so that they can group certain things together logically. 0:31 Take for instance this very simple spreadsheet. 0:36 Everything is lumped together in one large table or dataset. 0:39 It's easy for a human to read like this but as you add more rows and 0:43 columns, it would get more and more difficult to read and maintain. 0:47 Let's briefly look at it through the eyes of a database designer. 0:51 Upon first glance, 0:54 the database designer would probably notice there are three main data groups. 0:55 Customer, car and sale. 1:00 They would be broken apart into separate tables. 1:03 They might also notice within car there is a chance to have repeating makes. 1:06 So, they would make that separate as well. 1:11 This separation is called normalization. 1:15 As the normalization process comes to completion, 1:18 the designer will end up with a data model that might look something like this. 1:21 This is a crude representation of the normalization process. 1:27 We'll go into this into a little more detail in the next video. 1:31