Are 'Functional Dependency' and 'Normalization' same things with two different names?
1 Answers
2
votes
They're not the same thing.
Functional dependency describes a characteristic of two sets of attributes. For example, if you're given a country's officially assigned two-letter ISO country code, you also know the country name. You might say "The officially assigned two-letter ISO country code determines the country name." In relational notation, you might write that as A->B, read out loud as "A determines B", where A represents the ISO code, and B represents the country's name.
Normalization is a process of changing a relation from a less-desirable structure to a more-desirable structure. In the lower normal forms, those changes are based on functional dependencies.
Kent's paper, A Simple Guide to Five Normal Forms in Relational Database Theory, is probably a better reference for you right now.
