Basit Farooq is a Lead Database Administrator, Trainer and Technical Author. He has more than a decade of IT experience in development, technical training and database administration on Microsoft SQL Server platforms. Basit has authored numerous SQL Server technical articles, and developed and implemented many successful database infrastructure, data warehouse and business intelligence projects. He holds a master's degree in computer science from London Metropolitan University, and industry standard certifications from Microsoft, Sun, Cisco, Brainbench, Prosoft and APM, including MCITP Database Administrator 2008, MCITP Database Administrator 2005, MCDBA SQL Server 2000 and MCTS .NET Framework 2.0 Web Applications.
Normalization, which is the key part of the OLTP databases logical design process, is a design requirement for OLTP databases. Normalization refers to a process used to design relational database tables. Its objectives include minimizing the duplication of information within OLTP databases, as well as reducing the overall size of databases and making databases more efficient.
Checkout my article here, in which I discussed the basic guidelines for normalizing database tables to the third normal form (3NF), which helps you to meet design goals. Finally, I outlined key points that will help you decide when it is appropriate to denormalized database tables.
This article is published on SSWUG.org.