4 ms·

> Someone, somewhere writing down a list and that list being blessed with the imprimatur of Academic Approval (TM) One problem is that normal forms are undersp

> Someone, somewhere writing down a list and that list being blessed with the imprimatur of Academic Approval (TM) One problem is that normal forms are underspecified even by the academy. E.g., Millist W. Vincent "A corrected 5NF definition for relational database design" (1997) (!) shows that the traditional definition of 5NF was deficient. 5NF was introduced in 1979 (I was one year old then). 2NF and 3NF should basically be merged into BCNF, if I understand correctly, and treated like a general case (as per Darwen). Also, the numeric sequence is not very useful because there are at least four non-numeric forms (https://andreipall.github.io/sql/database-normalization/ https://andreipall.github.io/sql/database-normalization/). Also, personally I think that 6NF should be foundational, but that's a separate matter.

jerf 5mo ago
"1979 (I was one year old then)." Well, we are roughly the same age then. Our is a cynical generation. "One problem is that normal forms are underspecified even by the academy." The cynic in me would say they were doing their job by the example I gave, which is just to provide easy test answers, after which there wasn't much reason to iterate on them. I imagine waiving around normalization forms was a good gig for consultants in the 1980 but I bet even then the real practitioners had a skeptical, arm's length relationship with them.
- johnthescott 5mo ago
  yep. born 1960.
- DaiPlusPlus 5mo ago
  > I imagine waiving around normalization forms was a good gig for consultants in the 1980 but I bet even then the real practitioners had a skeptical, arm's length relationship with them. Real-talk: those consultants are absolutely essential - and are the unsung heroes of so many "organic" database projects that would have gotten started as an Excel spreadsheet on a nontechnical middle-manager's workgroup-networked desktop, which grew over time into a dBase file, then MSAccess/JET, then MSDE or MSSQL Express if they (think) they knew what they're doing, and then if it's the mid-2000s then maybe it'll be moved onto dedicated on-prem Oracle or MSSQL box - but still an RDBMS; I remember in 2014 all the talk was about moving data out of on-prem RDBMS siloes and onto Cloud(TM)-y OLAP clusters (trying to hide the fact they're running stock Postgres) which acted as a source for a Hadoop cluster - all to produce dashboards and visualizations made with the $100k Tableau license your company purchased after their sales guys showed your org's procurement people a good time in Cancun. None of the evolution and progress described above could have happened if not for the awful DB designs in that initial Access DB - the anti-patterns would be carried through the DB whenever it ascended to the next tier of serious-business-ness, and each and every design-decision made out of innocent ignorance gets gradually massaged-out of the model by the regular and recurring visits by DBA consultants - because (and goddamnit it's true): a depressingly tiny proportion of software people (let alone computer-people) know anything about DB design+theory - nor all the vendor-specific gotchas. What I still don't understand is how in 2026 - after 30 years of scolding beginners online - that we've successfully gotten greenhorn software-dev people to move away from VBA/VB6's dead-end, PHP's unintentional fractal of bad design, and MySQL's meh-ness - and onto sane and capable platforms like TypeScript, Node, and Postgres - all good stuff; and yet on my home-turf on StackOverflow, I still see people writing SQL-92 style JOINs and CREATE TABLE statements covered in more backticks than my late grandmother's labrador. I honestly have no idea where/when/how all those people somehow learned SQL-92's obsolete JOIN syntax today. So in conclusion: the evidence suggests that not enough people today truly understand databases well-enough to render expensive DBA consultants irrelevant.
  - petalmind 5mo ago
    Thank you, your take on the evolution from spreadsheets to proper databases is englightening.
- UltraSane 5mo ago
  Correct database normalization seems like it would have been make or break in a time of incredibly slow storage.
DaiPlusPlus 5mo ago
> Also, personally I think that 6NF should be foundational, but that's a separate matter. I share your ideal, but there exists a slight problem: no RDBMS I'm aware of really facilitates 6NF or DKNF (or even Codd's full relational concept; or newfound essentials like relational-division, and so on...). There are also genuine ergonomic issues to contend with: pretty-much every RDBMS design and/or administration tool I've used in the past 20 years (SSMS, SSDT, DBeaver, MSAccess (lol), phpMyAdmin, etc) will present the database as a long, flat list of tables - often only in alphabetical order (if you're lucky, the tooling might let you group the tables into logical subfolders based on some kind of 2-part name scheme baked into the RDBMS (e.g. "schemas" in MSSQL). ...which starts being counterproductive when 6NF means you have a large number of tables that absolutely need to exist - but aren't really that significant alone by themselves; but they always need to remain accessible to the user of the tool (so they can't be completely hidden). So you'll turn to the Diagramming feature in your DB GUI, which gives you a broader 2D view of your DB where you can proximally group related objects together - instead of endlessly scrolling a long alphabetical list; and you can actually see FKs represented by physical connections which aids intuitive groking when you're mentally onboarding onto a huge, legacy production DB design. ...but DB diagrams are just too slow to load (as the tooling needs to read the entire DB's schema, design; all objects first before it can give you a useful view of everything - it's just so incredibly grating; whereas that alphabetical list loads instantly. Sorry I'm just rambling now but anyway, my point is, 6NF is great, but our tooling sucks, and the RDBMS they connect to suck even more (e.g. SQL-92 defined the 4 main CONSTRAINT types seen in practically all RDBMS today (CHECK, FOREIGN KEY, UNIQUE, and DEFAULT); over 30 years later we still have the same anaemic set of primitive constraints; only Postgres went further (with its `EXCEPT` constraint). As of 2026, and almost 40 years since it was defined, no RDBMS supports ASSERTION constraints; wither DOMAIN constraints and a unified type-system that elegantly mediates between named scalars, relations (unordered sets of tuples), queries, and DOMAINs and the rest. ...this situation is maddening to me because so many data-modelling problems exist _because_ of how unevolved our RDBMS are.
- BenjiWiebe 5mo ago
  DBeaver can show a relationship diagram between tables. It's the main reason I've used it at all. https://dbeaver.com/docs/dbeaver/ER-Diagrams/ https://dbeaver.com/docs/dbeaver/ER-Diagrams/

jerf 5mo ago

"1979 (I was one year old then)." Well, we are roughly the same age then. Our is a cynical generation. "One problem is that normal forms are underspecified even by the academy." The cynic in me would say they were doing their job by the example I gave, which is just to provide easy test answers, after which there wasn't much reason to iterate on them. I imagine waiving around normalization forms was a good gig for consultants in the 1980 but I bet even then the real practitioners had a skeptical, arm's length relationship with them.

johnthescott 5mo ago
yep. born 1960.
DaiPlusPlus 5mo ago
> I imagine waiving around normalization forms was a good gig for consultants in the 1980 but I bet even then the real practitioners had a skeptical, arm's length relationship with them. Real-talk: those consultants are absolutely essential - and are the unsung heroes of so many "organic" database projects that would have gotten started as an Excel spreadsheet on a nontechnical middle-manager's workgroup-networked desktop, which grew over time into a dBase file, then MSAccess/JET, then MSDE or MSSQL Express if they (think) they knew what they're doing, and then if it's the mid-2000s then maybe it'll be moved onto dedicated on-prem Oracle or MSSQL box - but still an RDBMS; I remember in 2014 all the talk was about moving data out of on-prem RDBMS siloes and onto Cloud(TM)-y OLAP clusters (trying to hide the fact they're running stock Postgres) which acted as a source for a Hadoop cluster - all to produce dashboards and visualizations made with the $100k Tableau license your company purchased after their sales guys showed your org's procurement people a good time in Cancun. None of the evolution and progress described above could have happened if not for the awful DB designs in that initial Access DB - the anti-patterns would be carried through the DB whenever it ascended to the next tier of serious-business-ness, and each and every design-decision made out of innocent ignorance gets gradually massaged-out of the model by the regular and recurring visits by DBA consultants - because (and goddamnit it's true): a depressingly tiny proportion of software people (let alone computer-people) know anything about DB design+theory - nor all the vendor-specific gotchas. What I still don't understand is how in 2026 - after 30 years of scolding beginners online - that we've successfully gotten greenhorn software-dev people to move away from VBA/VB6's dead-end, PHP's unintentional fractal of bad design, and MySQL's meh-ness - and onto sane and capable platforms like TypeScript, Node, and Postgres - all good stuff; and yet on my home-turf on StackOverflow, I still see people writing SQL-92 style JOINs and CREATE TABLE statements covered in more backticks than my late grandmother's labrador. I honestly have no idea where/when/how all those people somehow learned SQL-92's obsolete JOIN syntax today. So in conclusion: the evidence suggests that not enough people today truly understand databases well-enough to render expensive DBA consultants irrelevant.
- petalmind 5mo ago
  Thank you, your take on the evolution from spreadsheets to proper databases is englightening.
UltraSane 5mo ago
Correct database normalization seems like it would have been make or break in a time of incredibly slow storage.

DaiPlusPlus 5mo ago

> Also, personally I think that 6NF should be foundational, but that's a separate matter. I share your ideal, but there exists a slight problem: no RDBMS I'm aware of really facilitates 6NF or DKNF (or even Codd's full relational concept; or newfound essentials like relational-division, and so on...). There are also genuine ergonomic issues to contend with: pretty-much every RDBMS design and/or administration tool I've used in the past 20 years (SSMS, SSDT, DBeaver, MSAccess (lol), phpMyAdmin, etc) will present the database as a long, flat list of tables - often only in alphabetical order (if you're lucky, the tooling might let you group the tables into logical subfolders based on some kind of 2-part name scheme baked into the RDBMS (e.g. "schemas" in MSSQL). ...which starts being counterproductive when 6NF means you have a large number of tables that absolutely need to exist - but aren't really that significant alone by themselves; but they always need to remain accessible to the user of the tool (so they can't be completely hidden). So you'll turn to the Diagramming feature in your DB GUI, which gives you a broader 2D view of your DB where you can proximally group related objects together - instead of endlessly scrolling a long alphabetical list; and you can actually see FKs represented by physical connections which aids intuitive groking when you're mentally onboarding onto a huge, legacy production DB design. ...but DB diagrams are just too slow to load (as the tooling needs to read the entire DB's schema, design; all objects first before it can give you a useful view of everything - it's just so incredibly grating; whereas that alphabetical list loads instantly. Sorry I'm just rambling now but anyway, my point is, 6NF is great, but our tooling sucks, and the RDBMS they connect to suck even more (e.g. SQL-92 defined the 4 main CONSTRAINT types seen in practically all RDBMS today (CHECK, FOREIGN KEY, UNIQUE, and DEFAULT); over 30 years later we still have the same anaemic set of primitive constraints; only Postgres went further (with its `EXCEPT` constraint). As of 2026, and almost 40 years since it was defined, no RDBMS supports ASSERTION constraints; wither DOMAIN constraints and a unified type-system that elegantly mediates between named scalars, relations (unordered sets of tuples), queries, and DOMAINs and the rest. ...this situation is maddening to me because so many data-modelling problems exist _because_ of how unevolved our RDBMS are.

BenjiWiebe 5mo ago
DBeaver can show a relationship diagram between tables. It's the main reason I've used it at all. https://dbeaver.com/docs/dbeaver/ER-Diagrams/ https://dbeaver.com/docs/dbeaver/ER-Diagrams/