Can someone teach me the basics of normalization, I really dont get it.

[coffayndtea]

I asked a question earlier about a complicated database and although I am sure the answer was accurate I could not make sense of it, so can someone try explaining this simpler example to me please?

http://i1253.photobucket.com/albums/...nk/pickmoi.jpg

Please explain in as simple terms as possible because i truly cannot understand

[mejia.j88]

attach the picture from the link?

[Xonos]

I am new to this as well but this is what I've figured out so far.

Database Normalization involves the structure of tables and relationships and how they're created to achieve minimal cpu usage to search through an extensive amount of data (AFAIK).

So let's say you have the following tables and you're attempting to build a library database. This is VERY simplistic but it may help you understand the concept of relationships which I believe are essential for good db normalization. (Everything I know are read from various resources that could be wrong so I stand by my advice with this as a disclaimer. :P )

tblBookTracking

ID	AutoNumber
CustomerID	Number
Pickup Date	Date
Return Date	Date
BookID	Number

tblCustomers

ID	AutoNumber
Full Name	Text
Address	Text
Phone Number	Text
Phone Number2	Text
Notes	Memo

tblBooks

ID	AutoNumber
Book Name	Text
Genre	Text
Author	Text
Location	Text
Availability	Number

Alright, with these three tables - you may create relationships in between them to retrieve data related to one-another. I believe the structure we'd go for in this instances is called a "Many-to-Many Relationship". For example:

[tblBookTracking].[BookID] should have a one-to-many relationship with [tblBooks].[ID] because we want one customer to have many books with different return dates.
[tblBooks].[ID] ∞<------->1[tblBookTracking].[BookID] <The relationship should look like this.

The same applies to [tblBookTracking].[CustomerID] and [tblCustomers].[ID] however, we want it so that there can be multiple customers with the same ID placed in the tblBookTracking table so we want a similar relationship.
[tblCustomers].[ID]1<------->∞[tblBookTracking].[CustomerID]

[tblBookTracking] is our way of storing data in multiple tables to reduce load-times and promote healthy database structure. Imagine if we stored Books, Customers and BookTracking all in one table. This would actually work quite well at first until limitations such as dramatically slow queries upon database growth, increased cpu consumption and more rear their ugly heads. I'd think of this as a way of keeping data organized so that massive piles of data do not have to be parsed when searching for one book, client or other related information.

If you're bored, go onto Microsoft's TechNet and look at their Access tutorials. They're in video as well as text, use simplistic terminology and are very easy to follow... Hell, if I can learn from them - anyone can. And for those who are likely to step in and correct me, thanks.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/tr...006118141.aspx