For this week’s blog post, we were told to read the article “A Simple Guide to Five Normal Forms in Relational Database Theory” by William Kent. Kent discusses the “normal forms” and normalization rules that are used to insure that there are no data inconsistencies. The first normal form states that there must be the same number of fields for each type of occurrence. The second and third normal form state that the non-key field must relate and provide a fact about the key, and nothing but that key, and must satisfy the first normal form. These two normal forms keep the data consistent and reduce redundancy, therefore keeping the database functional. The fourth and fifth normal forms deal with multi-valued facts, which include many-to-many and many-to-one relationships. The purpose of these two normal forms are to minimize the number of fields that are involved in a composite key and keep these facts independent of each other. Kent also discusses unavoidable redundancies and inter-record redundancy. What he means by “unavoidable redundancies” is that normalization does not get rid of all redundancies within your database. By reading this article, I have learned that data design processes are very complex and hard to make sure they are normalized. His five normal forms will be extremely useful when creating my own database in the future because I will be able to make it efficient and eliminate all redundancies that could confuse myself, others, and the database.