An entity is in the second normal form if all of its attributes depend on the whole (primary) key. In relational terms, every column in a table must be functionally dependent on the whole primary key of that table. Functional dependency indicates that a link exists between the values in two different columns.
If the value of an attribute depends on a column, the value of the attribute must change if the value in the column changes. The attribute is a function of the column. The following explanations make this more specific:
If the table has a one-column primary key, the attribute must depend on that key.
If the table has a composite primary key, the attribute must depend on the values in all its columns taken as a whole, not on one or some of them.
If the attribute also depends on other columns, they must be columns of a candidate key; that is, columns that are unique in every row.
If you do not convert your model to the second normal form, you risk data redundancy and difficulty in changing data. To convert first-normal-form tables to second-normal-form tables, remove columns that are not dependent on the primary key.
Using a name as the primary key violates the principle of stability. The social security number might be a valid choice, but a foreign employee might not have a social security number. This is a case where a derived, rather than a natural, primary key is appropriate. A derived key is an artificial key that you create. A natural key is one that is already part of the database.
In general all organization data bases are normalised to 3nf inorder to remove redundancy and efficent access.A data base can also be created with out normalisation.Hence it is not a mandatory that a database should be in 3nf.
Recursive relationships are an interesting and more complex concept than the relationships you have seen in the previous chapters, such as a one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many. A recursive relationship occurs when there is a relationship between an entity and itself. For example, a one-to-many recursive relationship occurs when an employee is the manager of other employeess. The employee entity is related to itself, and there is a one-to-many relationship between one employee (the manager) and many other employees (the people who report to the manager). Because of the more complex nature of these relationships, we will need slightly more complex methods of mapping them to a schema and displaying them in a stylesheet.
An entity is in the third normal form if it is in the second normal form and all of its attributes are not transitively dependent on the primary key. Transitive dependence means that descriptor key attributes depend not only on the whole primary key, but also on other descriptor key attributes that, in turn, depend on the primary key. In SQL terms, the third normal form means that no column within a table is dependent on a descriptor column that, in turn, depends on the primary key.
For 3NF, first, the table must be in 2NF, plus, we want to make sure that the non-key fields are dependent upon ONLY the PK, and not other non-key fields for its existence. This is very similar to to 2NF, except that now you are comparing the non-key fields to OTHER non-key fields. After all, we know that the relationship to the PK is good, because we established that in 2NF.
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