Algorithm for Relational Database Normalization Up to 3NF

Abstract

When an attempt is made to modify tables that have not been sufficiently normalized undesirable side-effects may follow. This can be further specified as an update, insertion or deletion anomaly depending on whether the action that causes the error is a row update, insertion or deletion respectively. If a relation R has more than one key, each key is referred to as a candidate key of R. Most of the practical recent works on database normalization use a restricted definition of normal forms where only the primary key (an arbitrary chosen key) is taken into account and ignoring the rest of candidate keys. In this paper, we propose an algorithmic approach for database normalization up to third normal form by taking into account all candidate keys, including the primary key. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated on many real world examples.