Seonglae Cho- Principle of Orthogonal Design (POOD): Base relations are independent;
- Principle of Representational Parsimony (PORP): There are no superfluous base relations;
- Principle of Expressive Completeness (POEC): All meaningful relations are derivable from the base relations.
- Principle of Full Normalization (POFN) : Every base relation should be in its highest normal form. Thus eliminating redundancy and preventing anomalies by ensuring that each relation is free from undesirable characteristics like partial, transitive, or join dependencies.
- The Information Principle (TIP) : All information in the database is represented explicitly and in exactly one way — by attribute values drawn from domains in relations.
- Principle of Logical Independence (PLI) : Application programs and terminal activities remain logically unimpaired when information preserving changes of any kind that theoretically permit unimpairment are made to the base relations.
The principles of database design, or, the Truth is out there
Every software project needs to represent the reality of the business he is embedded in. The way we can represent reality as limited rational beings is through propositions, i.e, declarative statements that affirm or deny something about reality. When a collection of such propositions is stored in a computer system, we call it a database. Such database needs to be designed to properly reflect reality. This can’t be automated, since the semantics of the situation need to be encoded in a way that can be processed by a computer.
https://ebellani.github.io/blog/2025/the-principles-of-database-design-or-the-truth-is-out-there