SERVICE REQUEST SR-KF-013 6
Service Request SR-ht-003: Change Request 4 & 5
Learning Team “D."
Shane Singh, Kendrick Boyd, Evan Rosado
DBM/380
May 31st, 2015
Ilka Kawashita
Service Request SR-ht-003
Normalization is the process of organizing data in database effectively. In a database, normalization is the process of breaking data down into basic components (Date, 1999). We can use this method to remove redundancy in data. This process is a database refinement process that organizes a database; so, the data in the database are always unambiguous. The main goal of normalization is to reduce the duplicate entries in the database. These duplicate entries will occupy more memory space, and it leads data corruption because the same information is stored in different locations. Because there are many problems within the database creation process, Normalization was created to avoid these problems (Sunitha, 2013).
The Importance of Normalization
Normalization is important because it signifies the process of breaking a table down into multiple tables until each has only one theme. However is necessary to understand functional dependencies before going through the normalization process. This concept says that if the value one field is known, then the values of another field will also be known. When conducting truck fleet maintenance, for example, if we know the Part ID number (PartID), we should also be able to determine the name, type, department, and location. Functional dependencies do not necessarily work in reverse order. For instance, if we know the PartType, we do not know which part we are referring to since more than one part could relate to the type. PartID would determine the type. Therefore, PartID is the determinant, and PartType is functionally dependent on the PartID. The key to having a well-formed relation is that every determinant must be a candidate key. If a determinant is not a candidate key, a new table must be created that contains that determinant as the primary key with the dependents as the other fields within that table. Thus, it is important to understand these principles when dealing with normalization.
The Process
The process used to normalize the fleet truck maintenance database will be done by a three-stage method for normalization. Data integrity is the most important reason to normalize the fleet truck maintenance system.
The first stage in this process will be to find any redundancies in any of the information. To find the redundancies, you will have to go through each table in the Truck fleet maintenance system database and figure out if there were any groups that were recurrent on each table. If there are any redundancies found, we will make the necessary changes to eliminate the redundancies. After all redundancies have been removed, we can start identifying dependencies within tables. In most cases identifying the dependencies are usually done by figuring out which keys remain dependent on the other keys.
The next stage in this process of normalization will require the removal of partial dependencies that appear when there's a combination primary key, which usually means there are two columns arranged together as primary keys. When this occurs in the truck fleet database, it has to be removed by breaking down the table with the dependencies. This process will remove the partial dependencies
The third and final 3NF stage in this normalization process of the truck fleet maintenance database will focus on eliminating all transitive dependencies. This process is usually seen when a key is dependent on another key, which is also nonprime - this will have to be removed. For the removal of the nonprime, all of its dependencies are eliminated from the prior table and added to the new table. For the truck fleet maintenance database, we removed all of the secondary primary keys, so that we no longer have a two key dependency in any one table, so that it is now in 3NF. We will monitor the database to make any necessary changes and look out for any issues or problems with the tables that need attention.
REFERENCES
· G. Sunitha, A Knowledge Based Approach for Automatic Database Normalization, in: [5], pp. 1816-1819. (2013)
· Date, C. J. (1999),An Introduction to Database Systems(8th ed.). Addison-Wesley Longman.ISBN 0-321-19784-4.
· Normalization. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://condor.depaul.edu/gandrus/240IT/accesspages/normalization3.htm
Ø DBM 380/Online
Ø LT Assignment Rubric Template – Week 4
Ø Continue working on Service Request SR-ht-003, due in Week Five, by completing Change Requests 4 and 5.
Ø Create documentation describing the principles and importance of normalization in relation to this project and the process by which this project was normalized.
Ø Format your paper consistent with APA guidelines.
Ø Submit a draft of your team’s documentation to the Assignments link.
Ø Click the Assignment Files tab to submit your assignment by Monday (day 7).
Content and Organization5 Points / Points Earned:
3/5 / Comments:
Create documentation describing the principles and importance of normalization in relation to this project / 1/1 / Documentation describing the principles and importance of normalization in relation to this project was created
Described the process used to normalize the truck fleet maintenance system / 1/1 / Normalization was applied to this project
Present normalized database / 1/3 / Normalized database was not presented, the ERD was. Note that table Personnel is still loose in the diagram and it does not make sense to have a table without any relationships in a database. You must post the database. I also noted three clusters of data: Parts, Customers and Trucks. How these themes relate to each other? Are there relationships missing? Check it out
Total
5 Points / Points Earned:
3/5 / Comments: Well done! Paper explained the normalization process in general, and applied its rules to this project.
Ø