From the course: Learning Relational Databases

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Maintain a consistent structure

Maintain a consistent structure

From the course: Learning Relational Databases

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Maintain a consistent structure

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- [Instructor] One of the habits that sometimes come over from the world of spreadsheets is the tendency to try and store multiple pieces of information of the same type in a single field. This typically shows up as a comma separated list of values where one record has several corresponding data items. Here's an example of what this might look like. Let's suppose that we wanted to keep track of the names of our employees' children, as part of the health benefits that we provide. An initial thought would be to simply create a new column in our employees table and place the names there. When we do that, however, you can quickly see what happens. Any employees that have more than one child will have that information stored as a list of multiple names. Once again, we have a structure that'll work well for us personally, but doesn't help the database organize your information in the most efficient manner. This is why it's called a multivalued field. And it's inherently difficult to search…

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