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Relational Databases and Normalization

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Abstract

In today’s world of big data, it’s easy to forget just how much of the world’s systems run on relational databases. But the fact remains, relational databases still dominate the data space. There is good reason for this: They work incredibly well, particularly when dealing with structured, well-defined data.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Matt Asay, “NoSQL Keeps Rising, But Relational Databases Still Dominate Big Data,” https://www.techrepublic.com/article/nosql-keeps-rising-but-relational-databases-still-dominate-big-data/ , April 5, 2016.

  2. 2.

    With SQL being the primary language of relational databases, NoSQL is meant to mean “no relational databases.”

  3. 3.

    If you don’t know what Hadoop is, don’t worry about it; it’s not important for this discussion.

  4. 4.

    Multitenancy refers to the architecture technology used by Salesforce and other cloud systems to allow for individual customer systems (orgs) to share infrastructure and resources. It’s an analogy to a building with many tenants. Every tenant has their own private space, but they also make use of the building’s resources. If you are interested in the details of Salesforces’ multitenant architecture, see Anonymous, “The Force.com Multitenant Architecture, https://developer.salesforce.com/page/Multi_Tenant_Architecture , March 31, 2016.

  5. 5.

    For more information, see William L. Hosch, “Edgar Frank Codd,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edgar-Frank-Codd , August 19, 2018.

  6. 6.

    If you get to third normal form, you can say your data are “fully normalized,” even though there exist fourth and fifth normal forms, which are not discussed here.

  7. 7.

    These are also often called intersection tables.

  8. 8.

    I say “want” because we could always choose to search the whole list unsorted. Also, we should always index our PK (most RDBMSs do this for you).

  9. 9.

    Even if our index is clustered, the RDBMS must first find the proper location to insert the data, as opposed simply to writing it at the end of the file, as it would if there was no index.

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© 2019 David Masri

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Masri, D. (2019). Relational Databases and Normalization. In: Developing Data Migrations and Integrations with Salesforce. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-4209-4_1

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