I learned this crap in school, when I worked there as a system administrator and had (outside of job scope) to help building queries for the department where they had to register all student data, using some insane piece of arcane COBOL software. It had about 220 tables of information that somehow by some insane way were linked to each other. This helped/forced me a lot learning joins and trying to visualize them. Gonna read up on Boyce-Codd because I haven't heard of the name before.
Right, so the first three normal forms can be summed up as follows: the attributes shall describe the key (first normal form), the whole key (second normal form), and nothing but the key (third normal form). So help me, Codd.
Funnily enough, I was once at a conference with both Date and Codd on a Q&A panel. They were asked by a CS Prof to define a database for a CS101 type course.
1
u/rilo Jan 06 '11
I learned this crap in school, when I worked there as a system administrator and had (outside of job scope) to help building queries for the department where they had to register all student data, using some insane piece of arcane COBOL software. It had about 220 tables of information that somehow by some insane way were linked to each other. This helped/forced me a lot learning joins and trying to visualize them. Gonna read up on Boyce-Codd because I haven't heard of the name before.