Normalisation of a database

Hi Veronica

Thank you for your question

The Normalisation process involves three steps; the first, second and third normal forms.

The First Normal Form involves removing any repeating fields from your tables. For instance if you had in a customers table fields for multiple contacts, e.g Contact 1, Contact 2 etc. then these should be removed to a seperate table.

The second and third normal forms involve removing from your tables any field that does not directly describe the unique entity described in the table. For example if you had a table describing your customers and you had the following fields; Customer ID, Customer Name, Salesperson ID and SalespersonSalary then you should remove the salsperson salary to another table as it describes not the customer, but the salesperson.

The Second normal form applies this to tables with compound primary keys, and the third to simple keys

Regards

Stephen