Professor Tesa — Navy turtleneck, reading glasses, hair pulled back — professor mode
“Your database schema is not a detail. It's the foundation. Get it wrong and everything built on top is a house of cards.”
Forget the academic definitions. Here's what normalization actually means:
**1NF:** Every field holds one value. No arrays crammed into strings.
**2NF:** Every non-key field depends on the WHOLE key, not part of it.
**3NF:** No field depends on another non-key field.
Or as I tell the Builder: "Every fact in one place. Every place for one fact."
The Planner enforces this automatically. When it detects a violation — say, storing a customer's name in the Orders table — it flags it and restructures.
Tesa says:
“I've seen databases where the same customer name existed in 47 different tables, spelled 12 different ways. Normalization isn't academic — it's sanity.”