Re: How can one normalize this table?



Thanks for the replies everyone.

> [Dawn replied]
> You did indicate that an employee can hold one and only one position,
> right?

Yes, and employee can hold one and only one position.

> [J M Davitt responds ]
> (I'm not sure I understand all of your constraints; it's not clear
> whether an employee can fill different positions in different
> offices.)

An employee can fill only one position but in many offices.

> Rats -- that was homework, wasn't it? In that case, I'll clue you in
> that many readers here think I'm clueless and clearly I was in this
> case. --dawn

This is actually for a real database for a real company. The existing
database is ugly; most
tables are not even in first normal form.

> [Jon Heggland writes:]
> If you do it this way, you'll need a multi-table constraint to implement
> the FD { p, o } -> { e }.

I'm not sure how to specify a multi-table constraint. I am going to
have to look into that. I am not actually working with a full-blown
relational DBMS. I just don't know how to indicate this functional
dependency without introducing a new table.

.