How to be Normal, a Guide for Developers

Mike Hillyer (Message Systems)

2:00pm Wednesday, 04/16/2008

General
Location: Ballroom B

Presentation: How to be Normal, a Guide for Developers Presentation [PDF]

At some point in every software project involving a database it becomes necessary for the developers who created (or inherited) the project to step back and take a look at their database. Many projects have a database schema that has evolved over time, with columns added here and tables added there, increasing complexity and often adding redundancy. Super-tables grow with more and more columns making ALTERs slow and backups difficult.

In this session MySQL author and speaker Mike Hillyer will guide the audience through the principles of database normalization and review some common normalization scenarios encountered by many application developers.

Topics include:

What is normalization and what are its benefits?
What are the normal forms?
- First Normal Form
- Second Normal Form
- Third Normal Form
- And so on…
Normalization Scenarios
Relationships and Joins
How Much is Too Much?

This session is intended for a beginner to intermediate audience and is applicable to developers and administrators who deal with database design.

People planning to attend this session also want to see:

Mike Hillyer

Message Systems

Mike Hillyer has been involved with the MySQL community for over six years, two of those spent as a Technical Writer for MySQL AB. He’s spoken at every MySQL User Conference since the first conference in 2003, on subjects ranging from VB6 development with MySQL to Managing Data Hierarchies.

Until recently he was a resident MySQL Expert for Techtarget’s SearchOpenSource.com site.

He is one of the top ranked MySQL experts at Experts-Exchange, a site for providing advice to fellow developers.

He currently works as an Engineer for Message Systems, a division of OmniTI Computer Consulting.