In the beginning, there was the Schema.

Data modeling is no mere chore of the hands; it is a labor of the soul. To the layman, the Elephant and the Coffee Table are distinct creatures of the earth. But to the Enlightened Architect? They are but shadows cast by the same celestial form.

They are Isomorphic. They are the Unified Support Manifestation.

Tablet I: The Genesis of DRY

The Architect forged the LeggedObject. It was a monolith of purity, etched into the production environment with the fire of a thousand commits.

As software engineers, we deal with data abstraction every day. We try to make sense of fuzzy real-world concepts and turn them into structured information, such as variables, functions, classes, and structs, that software can process. Working with data almost always involves storing it somewhere. One common option is a relational database, often called a SQL database. In this post, we will explore the normal forms of relational databases, what they are, and their benefits and drawbacks. We will cover only the first three because they are the most common in modern software engineering.