Database System

FURTHER NORMALIZATION II:

HIGHER NORMAL FORMS
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Topics in this Chapter

 Multi-Valued Dependencies and Fourth Normal Form

 Join Dependencies and Fifth Normal Form
 The Normalization Procedure Summarized
 A Note on Denormalization
 Orthogonal Design
 Other Normal Forms

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Rules for 4th Normal Form

 For a table to satisfy the Fourth Normal Form, it should satisfy the following
two conditions:
 It should be in the Boyce-Codd Normal Form.
 And, the table should not have any Multi-valued Dependency.
 Let's try to understand what multi-valued dependency is in the next
section.


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What is Multi-valued Dependency

 A table is said to have multi-valued dependency, if the following

conditions are true,
 For a dependency A → B, if for a single value of A, multiple value of B
exists, then the table may have multi-valued dependency.
 Also, a table should have at-least 3 columns for it to have a multi-valued
dependency.
 And, for a relation R(A,B,C), if there is a multi-valued dependency
between, A and B, then B and C should be independent of each other.
 If all these conditions are true for any relation(table), it is said to have multi-
valued dependency.

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Example

 Below we have a college enrolment table with columns s_id, course and hobby.

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Example

 As you can see in the table above, student with s_id 1 has opted for two
courses, Science and Maths, and has two hobbies, Cricket and Hockey.
 You must be thinking what problem this can lead to, right?
 Well the two records for student with s_id 1, will give rise to two more
records, as shown below, because for one student, two hobbies exists,
hence along with both the courses, these hobbies should be specified.

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Example

 And, in the table above, there is no relationship between the

columns course and hobby. They are independent of each other.
 So there is multi-value dependency, which leads to un-necessary
repetition of data and other anomalies as well.

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How to satisfy 4th Normal Form

 To make the above relation satisfy the 4th normal form, we

can decompose the table into 2 tables.
 Now this relation satisfies the fourth normal form.
 A table can also have functional dependency along with
multi-valued dependency. In that case, the functionally
dependent columns are moved in a separate table and the
multi-valued dependent columns are moved to separate
tables.

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Fifth Normal Form / Projected Normal
Form (5NF)

 A relation R is in 5NF if and only if every join dependency in R is implied by

the candidate keys of R. A relation decomposed into two relations must
have loss-less join Property, which ensures that no spurious or extra tuples
are generated, when relations are reunited through a natural join.
 Properties – A relation R is in 5NF if and only if it satisfies following
conditions:
 R should be already in 4NF.
 It cannot be further non loss decomposed (join dependency)

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Example

 Consider the above

schema, with a case as “if
a company makes a
product and an agent is
an agent for that
company, then he always
sells that product for the
company”. Under these
circumstances, the ACP
table is shown as:

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Example

 The relation ACP is again decompose into 3 relations. Now, the natural
Join of all the three relations will be shown as:


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Example

 Result of Natural Join of R1 and R3 over

‘Company’ and then Natural Join of R13
and R2 over ‘Agent’and ‘Product’ will be
table ACP.
 Hence, in this example, all the
redundancies are eliminated, and the
decomposition of ACP is a lossless join
decomposition. Therefore, the relation is
in 5NF as it does not violate the property
of lossless join.

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The Normalization Procedure Summarized

 Begin with a relvar in 1NF

 Take projections to eliminate FDs that are not irreducible; result is in 2NF
 Take projections to eliminate transitive FDs; result is in 3NF
 Take projections to eliminate FDs in which the determinant is not a
candidate key; result is BCNF
 Continue on next slide

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The Normalization Procedure Continued

 Using a relation in BCNF, take projections to eliminate MVDs that are not
also FDs
 In practice it is unlikely that you will need to do this, because you will have
eliminated independent relation valued attributes before you began
 Take projections of 4NF relation to eliminate JDs that are not implied by the
candidate keys, if you can find any

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Other Normal Forms

 Additional normal forms arise in the analysis of dependency theory

 Domain-key normal form (DK/NF) is not defined in terms of FDs, MVDs, or
JDs
 A relvar R is in DK/NF if and only if every constraint on R is a logical
consequence of the domain constraints and key constraints that apply to
R

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