Im building a database that has Course table with the follow

I\'m building a database that has Course table with the following attributes ( CourseID, name, code, specifications, hours, type, level, year) When I truned in my project, the professor said Course could be normlized further if there are courses in successive years with the same name and or code I\'m not sure I quite understand that! what does that mean and what can I do to normlize the table further?

Solution

Your professor said that if there you are using a course with a specific name and code in a year, and if suppose if the same course is there in the next year or any other years, then your Course table will have redundant data, that is, for each such year, there will be same course data present in the table. Thus you can normalize the Course table into the following 2 tables, thus the data redundancy can be avoided.

COURSE ( CourseID, name, code, specifications, hours, type, level)
COURSE_YEAR ( CourseID, year)

Here after this normalization, for each year with same course, you have only corresponding row data in the COURSE_YEAR table, whereas the COURSE table will remain the same(will contain only one record for a single course)