Data and Databases

When designing a database, one important concept to understand is normalization. In simple terms, to normalize a database means to design it in a way that: 1) reduces data redundancy; and 2) ensure data integrity.

In the School Database design, the design team worked to achieve these objectives. For example, to track grades, a simple (and wrong) solution might have been to create a Student field in the COURSE table and then just list the names of all of the students there. However, this design would mean that if a student takes two or more courses, then his or her data would have to be entered twice or more times. This means the data are redundant. Instead, the designers solved this problem by introducing the GRADE table.

In this design, when a student registers into the school system before taking a course, we first must add the student to the STUDENT table, where their ID, name, major, and e-mail address are entered. Now we will add a new entry to denote that the student takes a specific course. This is accomplished by adding a record with the StudentD and the CourseID in the GRADE table. If this student takes a second course, we do not have to duplicate the entry of the student's name, major, and e-mail; instead, we only need to make another entry in the GRADE table of the second course's ID and the student's ID.

The design of the School database also makes it simple to change the design without major modifications to the existing structure. For example, if the design team were asked to add functionality to the system to track instructors who teach the courses, we could easily accomplish this by adding a PROFESSOR table (similar to the STUDENT table) and then adding a new field to the COURSE table to hold the professors' ID.