PDF document by Hugh Darwen, C. J. Date, Ronald Fagin. 2012. Database design can be characterized as a matter of deciding what the database schema should be - that is, of deciding what attributes (intuitively, column names) should be in each individual relation schema, and what the constraints should be on the data. It has always been a goal of database design to make the database schema as redundancy-free as possible, and ever since the publication of Codd's first papers on the subject, the discipline of further normalization (normalization for short) has been used to help achieve that goal. In this paper, we define what it means for a tuple in a relation to be redundancy-free, or "essential", and we define a normal form where every tuple is essential.

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