I was studying normalization and trying to implement it on some examples. I was doing third normal form, which from what I understand is: "A relation is in 3NF if it's in 2NF and doesn't have any transitive dependencies".
I got stuck on an example, a table having more than one candidate key. How do we normalize that kind of table to 3NF?
VIN | Make | Model | Year | OwnerID |Owner
----------------------------------------------------
11a |Toyota| Corolla | 1988 | 11245 | John
11b |Nissan| Caor | 1988 | 12458 | Peter
11c |BMW | GMC | 1956 | 15487 | Anne
Here VIN is the primary key and clearly make, model, ownerID owner are candidate keys, which would have a transitive relation to each other and year. How do I break this down to 3NF?
Be careful when you infer dependencies from your example data. You say that make, model, ownerId are "clearly" candiate keys but that seems far from clear to me. Wouldn't you expect at some point that you might have more than one car of the same make and/or model? Couldn't it be the case that an owner might own more than one vehicle? You must consider what dependencies you actually want to enforce or you expect to be the case for all possible (correct) populations of data in the business domain. A dependency is a function of the business requirements and the reality being modelled, not just the current population of data.
With only your attribute names to go on I'd guess that the dependency OwnerId -> Owner might hold. If it happens that OwnerId is not a candidate key then that would be an example of a transitive dependency in violation of 3NF: Owner depends on a non-key attribute (OwnerId).
If you want to strictly hold to the normalization and it's normal forms, you would have to start with 1NF. You might create separate tables for Make,Model,Owner and rename current one into Car. Then you can add foreign keys respectively.
To uphold 2NF you can wonder to grab the year attribute from the VIN, which it contains as a model year number (does not necessarily have to be the same as the actual year of making).
3NF states that table columns should contain only columns that are fully dependent upon primary key, which would've been ok now.
Related
Lets say I have 3 models:
User
Page
Comments
I asked a question based on if I should have each model keep track of its relationships: SQL relationships and best practices
an example of this would be a "Pages" table that states who its author was... The problem seemed to be that if 2 users were the author of the one page, you'd have to add a new specific table called PageRelationshipsWithUsers that might have a reference to the PageID and the UserID that created it and a separate row for the co-author.
Understandably this sounds a bit naff. I would end up with a heck load of relation tables and most likely, it could be replaced with just the one multi-purpose relationship table... So I decided to come up with a relationships table like the following:
Relationships Table New
RelationshipID | ItemID | LinkID | ItemType | LinkType | Status
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | 23(PageID) | 7(UserID) | ("Page") | ("User") | TRUE
2 | 22(CommentID) | 7(UserID) | ("Comment") | ("User") | TRUE
3 | 22(CommentID) | 23(PageID) | ("Comment") | ("Page") | TRUE
however, I would very much appreciate some input as to how good of an idea laying out my relationships table like this is.
Any thoughts?
Answer was told to me by a work colleague:
Imagine the above relationships table for the model "Book"
A User can Rent a book, so the relation is User -> Book...
But what if he can buy a book too: User->Book....
Ooops, we need a new relationship... and considering this relationship table was supposed to be the 1 size fits all, we now have a requirement to add a new separate table... whoops.
So the answer is NO NO NO. don't, it's naughty. Keep your relationship tables separate and specific.
Your suggestion for a relationship table is not optimal for several reasons:
It's difficult to write queries that join tables through the relationship table, as you will need filters on the ItemType and LinkType columns, which is not intuitive when writing queries.
If a need arises to add new entities in the future, that use different datatypes for their primary keys, you cannot easily store ID's of various datatypes in your ItemID and LinkID columns.
You cannot create explicit foreign keys in your database, to enforce referential integrity, which is possibly the best reason to avoid the design you suggest.
Query performance might suffer.
When normalizing a database, you should not be afraid to have many tables. Just make sure to use a naming convention that makes sense and is self-documenting. For example, you could name the relation table between authors and pages "PageAuthors", instead of "Pages".
I have a simple question, but I am still confused about it.
Whenever you design an ER model, how are you supposed to draw PK's and FK's ?
Let's say I have two tables, User and Country
User
ID | firstName | lastName | FKCountry
1 | John | Stewart | 1
2 | Paul | Duschmol | 2
etc.
Country
ID | country | code
1 | Germany | GER
2 | Switzerland | CH
etc...
Well, should I add the column "FKCountry" in the ER model or not ? I mean, there will be the relation (Rhombus) between both entities, but should I explicitly add the "FKCountry" by the User entity ?
Hope my question is clear, Thank you in advance :)
The primary purpose of Foreign Key is to enforce referential integrity between the two tables.
If the relationship of Country to a User is One-to-Many then it should be fine for adding column FKCountry on table User.
However, if the relationship is Many-to-Many in which Country can have many User as well as User belongs to multiple Country, then a 3-table design is much preferred. Wherein the 3rd table is the association table between the other two.
Yes, you should add FKCountry to the User table in your ER diagram. If the column exists in your table, it should be represented in the entity. There should be zero doubt that the relational marker connects Country.ID to User.FKCountry. Just because it is obvious in this example does not mean that in other relationships, the linked columns might not be named completely differently and not obvious.
Suppose that I have a store-website where user can leave comments about any product.
Suppose that I have tables(entities) in my website database: let it be 'Shoes', 'Hats' and 'Skates'.
I don't want to create separate "comments" table for every entity (like 'shoes_comments', 'hats_comments', 'skates_comments').
My idea is to somehow store all the comments in one big table.
One way to do this, that I thought of, is to create a table:
table (comments):
ID (int, Primary Key),
comment (text),
Product_id (int),
isSkates (boolean),
isShoes (boolean),
isHats (boolean)
and like flag for every entity that could have comments.
Then when I want to get comments for some product the SELECT query would look like:
SELECT comment
FROM comments, ___SOMETABLE___
WHERE ____SOMEFLAG____ = TRUE
AND ___SOMETABLE___.ID = comments.Product_id
Is this an efficient way to implement database for needed functionality?
What other ways i can do this?>
Sorry, this feels odd.
Do you indeed have one separate table for each product type? Don't they have common fields (e.g. name, description, price, product image, etc.)?
My recommendation as for tables: product for common fields, comments with foreign key to product but no hasX columns, hat with only the fields that are specific to the hat product line. The primary key in hat is either the product PK or an individual unique value (then you'd need an extra field for the foreign key to product).
I would recommend you to make one table for the comments and use a foreign key of other tables in the comments table.
The "normalized" way to do this is to add one more entity (say, "Product") that groups all characteristics common to shoes, hats and skates (including comments)
+-- 0..1 [Shoe]
|
[Product] 1 --+-- 0..1 [Hat]
1 |
| +-- 0..1 [Skate]
*
[Comment]
Besides performance considerations, the drawback here is that there is nothing in the data model preventing a row in Product to be referenced both by a row in Shoe and one in Hat.
There are other alternatives too (each with perks & flaws) - you might want to read something about "jpa inheritance strategies" - you'll find java-specific articles that discuss your same issue (just ignore the java babbling and read the rest)
Personally, I often end up using a single table for all entities in a hierarchy (shoes, hats and skates in our case) and sacrificing constraints on the altar of performance and simplicity (eg: not null in a field that is mandatory for shoes but not for hats and skates).
I'm trying to store a hierarchical tree in SQL. In my case, the same son can have many fathers (the tree represents a VLSI design where the same cells can be used several times in different designs).
All models I've found on the web describe the employee/manager relationship where each employee has one manager. In my case, the number of fathers can be quite large and if I try to store all of them in a table field, they can exceed the character limit of the field.
Can anyone suggest a better method for storing this tree ?
Thanks,
Meir
One possible way to store this relationship in a relational database would be to create two tables - EMPLOYEE_TABLE and EMPLOYEE_MANAGERS_TABLE
create table EMPLOYEE_TABLE(
emp_id number,
emp_name varchar(200),
primary key(emp_id)
)
create table EMPLOYEE_MANAGERS_TABLE (
id number,
emp_id number,
manager_id number,
primary key(id),
foreign key(emp_id) references employee_table(emp_id),
foreign key(manager_id) references employee_table(emp_id)
)
EMPLOYEE_MANAGERS_TABLE will contain one row per employee_manager relationship.
You can apply the same schema to store the father-son relationship where a son can have more than 1 father.
Use a link table. I'm going to assume you are talking about people and will use that vernacular.
You have a person_table listing all the people and their respective id's. You then have a father_son_table describing the links between each person. Eg.
person_table
id | Name
1 | Matthew
2 | Mark
3 | Luke
4 | John
Say Matthew is Mark's father and Mark was father to Luke and John. In the father_son_table you would have:
father_son_table
id | father_id | son_id
1 | 1 | 2
2 | 2 | 3
3 | 2 | 4
Here you can define as many fathers and sons as you wish.
the number of fathers can be quite large and if I try to store all of them in a table field
eh? Your data is not normalised if you're trying to put multiple values in the same field.
While you say its hierarchical this usually implies that a node has a single 'parent' and 0 or more descendants. If that's not the case then its NOT a hierarchical data model - its a M:N relationship.
Or do you mean that there each node exists in more than one hierarchy?
The question is imposible to answer unless you provide an accurate description of the relationship between records.
You find some clever methods for tree handling in the book of Joe Celko:
http://www.amazon.com/Joe-Celkos-SQL-Smarties-Programming/dp/1558605762
...however, I don't know if it covers your problem
You might want to consider what queries you will most frequently be running against this table. Different strategies for storing hierarchies have advantages / disadvantages based on how the hierarchy is used.
Also, any single-parent strategy for storing a hierarchy could be adapted to handle multiple parents simply by treating each element of the tree as a pointer. Pointers under different parents could each point to the same record.
I would go for additional many-to-many connection table with father_id and son_id columns.
I have a database that has two tables, these tables look like this
codes
id | code | member_id
1 | 123 | 2
2 | 234 | 1
3 | 345 |
4 | 456 | 3
members
id | code_id | other info
1 | 2 | blabla
2 | 1 | blabla
3 | 4 | blabla
the basic idea is that if a code is taken then its member id field is filled in, however this is creating a circle link (members points to codes, codes points to members) is there a different way of doing this? is this actually a bad thing?
Update
To answer your questions there are three different code tables with approx 3.5 million codes each, each table is searched depending on different criteria, if the member_id column is empty then the code is unclaimed, else, the code is claimed, this is done so that when we are searching the database we do not need to include another table to tell if it it claimed.
the members table contains the claimants for every single code, so all 10.5 million members
the additional info has things like mobile, flybuys.
the mobile is how we identify the member, but each entry is considered a different member.
It's a bad thing because you can end up with anomalies. For example:
codes
id | code | member_id
1 | 123 | 2
members
id | code_id | other info
2 | 4 | blabla
See the anomaly? Code 1 references its corresponding member, but that member doesn't reference the same code in return. The problem with anomalies is you can't tell which one is the correct, intended reference and which one is a mistake.
Eliminating redundant columns reduces the chance for anomalies. This is a simple process that follows a few very well defined rules, called rules of normalization.
In your example, I would drop the codes.member_id column. I infer that a member must reference a code, but a code does not necessarily reference a member. So I would make members.code_id reference codes.id. But it could go the other way; you don't give enough information for the reader to be sure (as #OMG Ponies commented).
Yeah, this is not good because it presents opportunities for data integrity problems. You've got a one-to-one relationship, so either remove Code_id from the members table, or member_id from the codes table. (in this case it seems like it would make more sense to drop code_id from members since it sounds like you're more frequently going to be querying codes to see which are not assigned than querying members to see which have no code, but you can make that call)
You could simply drop the member_id column and use a foreign key relationship (or its absence) to signify the relationship or lack thereof. The code_id column would then be used as a foreign key to the code. Personally, I do think it's bad simply because it makes it more work to ensure that you don't have corrupt relationships in the DB -- i.e., you have to check that the two columns are synchronized between the tables -- and it doesn't really add anything in the general case. If you are running into performance problems, then you may need to denormalize, but I'd wait until it was definitely a problem (and you'd likely replicate more than just the id in that case).
It depends on what you're doing. If each member always gets exactly one unique code then just put the actual code in the member table.
If there are a set of codes and several members share a code (but each member still has just one) then remove the member_id from the codes table and only store the unique codes. Access a specific code through a member. (you can still join the code table to search on codes)
If a member can have multiple codes then remove the code_id from the member table and the member_id from the code table can create a third table that relates members to codes. Each record in the member table should be a unique record and each record in the code table should be a unique record.
What is the logic behind having the member code in the code table?
It's unnecessary since you can always just do a join if you need both pieces of information.
By having it there you create the potential for integrity issues since you need to update BOTH tables whenever an update is made.
Yes this is a bad idea. Never set up a database to have circular references if you can help it. Now any change has to be made both places and if one place is missed, you have a severe data integrity problem.
First question can each code be assigned to more than one member? Or can each member have more than one code? (this includes over time as well as at any one moment if you need historical records of who had what code when))If the answer to either is yes, then your current structure cannot work. If the answer to both is no, why do you need two tables?
If you can have mulitple codes and multiple members you need a bridging table that has memberid and code id. If you can have multiple members assigned one code, put the code id in the members table. If it is the other way it should be the memberid in the code table. Then properly set up the foreign key relationship.
#Bill Karwin correctly identifies this as a probably design flaw which will lead to anomalies.
Assuming code and member are distinct entities, I would create a thrid table...
What is the relationship between a code and member called? An oath? If this is a real life relationship, someone with domain knowledge in the business will be able to give it a name. If not look for further design flaws:
oaths
code_id | member_id
1 | 2
2 | 1
4 | 3
The data suggest that a unique constraint is required for (code_id, member_id).
Once the data is 'scrubbed', drop the columns codes.member_id and members.code_id.