Database Management Systems (2130703)

Normalization is a process of organizing the data in database to avoid data redundancy, insertion anomaly, update anomaly & deletion anomaly. Let’s discuss about anomalies first then we will discuss normal forms with examples.

As per the rule of first normal form, an attribute (column) of a table cannot hold multiple values. It should hold only atomic values.

Example: Suppose a company wants to store the names and contact details of its employees. It creates a table that looks like this:

Two employees (Jon & Lester) are having two mobile numbers so the company stored them in the same field as you can see in the table above.

This table is not in 1NF as the rule says “each attribute of a table must have atomic (single) values”, the emp_mobile values for employees Jon & Lester violates that rule.

To make the table complies with 1NF we should have the data like this:

A table is said to be in 2NF if both the following conditions hold:

An attribute that is not part of any candidate key is known as non-prime attribute.

Example: Suppose a school wants to store the data of teachers and the subjects they teach. They create a table that looks like this: Since a teacher can teach more than one subjects, the table can have multiple rows for a same teacher.

Candidate Keys: {teacher_id, subject}

Non prime attribute: teacher_age

The table is in 1 NF because each attribute has atomic values. However, it is not in 2NF because non prime attribute teacher_age is dependent on teacher_id alone which is a proper subset of candidate key. This violates the rule for 2NF as the rule says “no non-prime attribute is dependent on the proper subset of any candidate key of the table”.

To make the table complies with 2NF we can break it in two tables like this:

Now the tables comply with Second normal form (2NF).