Dear NGs,
I recently downloaded and read a bunch of material on normalizing
your data and db design. Things aren't crystal clear yet! Part of
the problem is that nearly every thing I read used the same customer
invoice data as an example. I'm dealing with deer harvest data that
will never need updating (unlike customer data!). One nagging
question that I have deals with the 1NF and non-repeating groups. At
least to me it seems that you have two choices - either repeat groups
across records or transpose the data. Let me explain. This is a
sample of my data. When a deer is harvested by a hunter there are 4
pieces of information I collect:
Sex/age of deer (Male, Female, Button)
County of harvest (Adams, Allen, Ashland...)
Hunting season (Longbow, Crossbow, Gun, SWML, and a few others)
Year
The raw data are summarized each year and combined with data from
previous years into a table that looks like the following:
TABLE A
County Year Season Male Female Button
Adams 1980 Crossbow 40 100 67
Adams 1981 Gun 45 110 87
Allen 1980 Crossbow 50 700 670
Ignoring for a moment all that is wrong with it, my immediate
question is, should the "Male", "Female", and "Button" fields be
transposed to include a SexAge and "Value" field? IOW should the
above data look like this instead:
TABLE B
County Year Season SexAge Deer
Adams 1980 Crossbow M 40
Adams 1980 Crossbow F 100
Adams 1980 Crossbow B 67
Adams 1981 Gun M 45
>From where I stand, there is at least 1 reason to set it up like
TABLE B - I'm always in need of total harvest (M+F+B). It would be
much easier to get total harvest for a county, season, and year with
Table B. So, how does this relate to "repeating groups" and first
normal form - SexAge is now repeating across records. I guess the
solution would now be separate tables!
Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated.
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