03. Normalized Design Part Two

Check out William Kent's paper "A Simple Guide to Five Normal Forms in Relational Database Theory" for a lot more about normalization and how it can help your database design.

Wikipedia's article on database normalization is somewhat brief, but describes some of the history of normalization as well as some more of the motivations for it.

You will sometimes hear about denormalization as an approach to making database queries faster by avoiding joins. This is an advanced topic beyond the scope of this course. But if you're interested in it, on modern database systems (such as PostgreSQL) it is often possible to meet the same goals using tools such as indexes and materialized views.