Database Normalization

Huffman Trucking Driver Log

University of Phoenix

Huffman Trucking Driver Log

Normalization is the process of organizing a database and splitting it into smaller tables to make it easier to manage. It involves creating tables and setting relationships between those tables using rules that help protect the data by avoiding redundancy and inconsistent dependency that may limit database flexibility. Data redundancy complicates the maintenance process and wastes hard drive space.

Database normalization is composed of a few rules, which are called “normal forms”. The normal forms are cumulative and there are a total of five normal forms but only the first three forms are commonly used. The first normal form (1NF) breaks down each field to the smallest meaningful value; it also removes repeating groups of data, and creates separate tables for related data. The second form (2NF) creates separate tables for data that applies to more than one record in a table, and adds foreign keys to the table. The third normal form gets rid of fields that are not related to the primary key.

The entities and attributes for the Huffman Trucking Driver Log were originally formed by three tables, which were: the Driver table, the Driving Log table and the Violations table. Each of the tables contained some information that was unrelated to the table’s primary key. I placed the information in a first normal form by separating tables for each set of related data. After that I looked for repeating data and removed it from the database and added related fields to the table to place the database into second form. I felt that the database could be left on second normal form but I decided to go a step further to try to eliminate redundancy and dependency as much as possible so I removed fields that were not related to each table’s primary key and set my database to third normal form. The normalized version of the Huffman Trucking Driver Log is composed 13 tables of data that pertains to...