Normalization

[leequeen]

Hello Everyone,

I have a design problem that maybe someone could help me with. I am refactoring an old table of mine that was developed long ago, before I knew anything about normalization.

The table is very simple. It is called population projections. The current schema is:

id, projection_year, year_round (population), seasonal

I'm trying to decide if it is better to break out the year_round from the seasonal and have two records with a type field, like:

id, projection_year, type, population

1, 2020, Year-Round, 23000
2, 2020, Seasonal, 42000

Anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks,
Lee

[skhanal]

Do you expect to have multiple rows for each year for seasonal population?. If there are going to be only one record for seasonal then your current design is good.

Even if you have more than one data for seasonal, if it is going to be fixed like summer, winter then it may be better to have columns for them.

[leequeen]

No, for instance, there will only be one value for year_round and one for seasonal in any given year.

Thanks for your reply.

[skhanal]

In that case your design is normalized.