I've been trying to self-learn normalisation for the last while and I just don't understand it. If you could help me normalise the below, I think I could understand it a little better.

author, date of birth of author, title, isbn, number of pages, author's nationality, genre, publisher, publisher's city, publisher's phone number

Zero normal form
author
date of birth of author
title
isbn
number of pages
author's nationality
genre
publisher
publisher's city
publisher's phone number

First normal form
author
name
date of birth
nationality

book
title
isbn
number of pages
genre

publisher
name
city
phone number

Second normal form
author
author_id
name
date of birth
nationality

book
book_id
title
isbn
number of pages
genre

publisher
publisher_id
name
city
phone number

Third normal form
author
author_id
name
date of birth
nationality

book
book_id
title
isbn
number of pages
genre

publisher
publisher_id
name
city
phone number

all_id
author_id
book_id
publisher_id

Sorry for posting this three times. I don't know why it did that. Probably my browser.

what's this?

Its where I join up all the tables for third normal form.

o rly?

and which table is that?

Its a table that joins the author, book and publisher tables.

Is it incorrect?

what is the table name?

Hmm...I don't think I named it. I guess it should be:

all
all_id
author_id
book_id
publisher_id

what is the "all_id" for?

more importantly, what do the rows of that table look like for a book that has more than one author?

hint: it is ~so~ not normalized

The all_id is the primary key for all table. How would you do it?

you will lose marks for such an ill-advised idea

fix the books-to-authors relationship first

1NF: identify repeating data from the rest, give it a primary key and establish link between the (now) two tables (carry over primary key and make it a foreign key in the new table)
2NF: remove partial dependencies (test all the fields in your non repeating data table against its brand new composite key, does this field depend on the primary key? yes? no, how about the foreign key? if partially dependent on one of them separate it into a new table carrying the key with it)
3NF: remove non partial dependencies

r937 is that right? (in simple(ish) terms)

gary223 i remember normalising the same data set last year, it was one of the first few we did. good times.

yes, that's pretty much correct, jack

sweet

I believe you need to normalize the genres field to it's own table for the table to be truly in 3rd normal form.

Otherwise you might end up having genres like sci-fi, scifi, SYFI etc.