In the reporting business, we would reverse some of the normalization process.

It’s the controlled introduction of redundancy in to the database design. It helps improve the query performance as the number of joins could be reduced.

Normalization is the process of efficiently organizing data in a database. There are two goals of the normalization process: eliminating redundant data and ensuring data dependencies make sense (only storing related data in a table).

First Normal Form (1NF) – primary key

First normal form (1NF) sets the very basic rules for an organized database:

• Eliminate duplicative columns from the same table.
• Create separate tables for each group of related data and identify each row with a unique column or set of columns (the primary key).

Second Normal Form (2NF) – foreign key

Second normal form (2NF) further addresses the concept of removing duplicative data:

• Meet all the requirements of the first normal form.
• Remove subsets of data that apply to multiple rows of a table and place them in separate tables.
• Create relationships between these new tables and their predecessors through the use of foreign keys.

Third Normal Form (3NF) – all columns depend on the PK

Third normal form (3NF) goes one large step further:

• Meet all the requirements of the second normal form.
• Remove columns that are not dependent upon the primary key.

Fourth Normal Form (4NF)

Finally, fourth normal form (4NF) has one additional requirement:

• Meet all the requirements of the third normal form.
• A relation is in 4NF if it has no multi-valued dependencies.