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Design Guidelines

Informal Guidelines for Good Design

  • Make sure that the semantics of the attributes are clear in the schema

    • Everything in an entity set except the foreign key should only describe something about the entity itself

  • Reduce redundant information

    • DRY - don't repeat yourself. This wastes space

  • Avoid NULL value as much as possible

    • null is a super-common reason that code gets messed up. avoid it wherever possible

  • Disallow the possibility of generating spurious tuples

    • This is seen in lossy reconstruction, which generates spurious (extra) tuples

  • Extra guideline - Preserve dependencies as much as possible