Posted by Kati Togliatti
By reading William Kent’s article on normal forms in relational database theory I learned a lot about how to format data. The article gave easy to follow examples that illustrated the concepts of different forms the data can have. Something specific that I was able to better understand from this article was the many-to-many and many-to-one relationships. I also now understand why the data would need to be broken up into different tables to make changes to the data easier to handle in the future.
This knowledge will be beneficial if it is decided to move the weather data I am collecting onto a relational database. Right now there are many weather stations all with the exact same instruments attached to them. Figuring out the best way to lay out the incoming data from these weather stations may require seperate tables to make the data easier to quality control and read in the future.