Warehousing 2

Your supervisor has approved your normalized versions of the database. Your team members were given copies. One of the members has sent you an e-mail with the following questions:

• Why are there so many more foreign keys in the third normal form than in the first? Is this always going to be true?
• Why is it important to define the primary keys of a file correctly? What happens to the third normal form when they are incorrectly defined?
• Some designers will say that to make an address file into third normal form, you should take out the city and state, place it into a different table, and link it by zip code. What advantages and disadvantages are there to this?
• When normalizing a table that can have a many-to-many relationship with another table, what steps should you take?
• What are the advantages of third normal form for applications with a lot of changes to the database, such as a data entry program?
• What are the disadvantages of third normal form for an application that does a lot of reporting on a stable database like general ledger month-end reporting?

Assignment Guidelines

• Answer the 6 questions outlined in the assignment description.
• Each answer should be about 1–2 paragraphs.