Hanging out in the #mysql channel on Freenode the other night, some members were talking about database normalization. I wasn’t sure what that term meant, so I followed the links that were pasted to find out more.  What I discovered was that these ‘normalization rules’ are very practical guidelines for schema creation that I’ve been using for years without knowing what they were called!

In the following article I start looking at the actual rules, and why they can be helpful!

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