It's nice to see Professor Wills here! You know a topic like this would get him going.
Bill, in my mind, a basic reason to normalize fully is to create a database that is least likely to need either schema changes or awkward exception-handling down the road. If you do not normalize, and you provide room for 3 phone numbers, some day you will have to put the fourth phone number in the comments, or change the schema to allow for 4 phone numbers. Schema changes are expensive, because all forms and reports and procedures and eeps and views and rules and triggers and applications that relate to that data may have to be changed, too, and cannot be done by users through "settings", but have to be done by programmers. Putting the data in the "wrong" place like the comments means people won't find that data with a normal search or query. There are other good reasons to normalize, like not "wasting" columns that are usually blank, and not having to search three or five columns instead of one (For example, to determine what customer might have sent us an incomplete or garbled fax message or credit card transaction where all we know is that their address is "345 Main Street"). But avoiding future expensive schema changes is the main one. Bill On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 11:02 AM, Wills, Steve <[email protected]> wrote: > “Too relational” is a state that is rarely achieved, IMHO. I think your > issue/question often and I like the direction of your thinking. I guess > that thinking about such makes me a little “twisted” to some. I also own > my own barcode-scanner - well enough about my predilections!**** > >
