Virtual 6NF
One of the goals of this substack is to research ways of removing historical cruft from the way relational model is taught. One thing that puzzles me particularly is why Sixth Normal Form (6NF) is historically treated so... reverently? Lots of texts on the internet consider 6NF to be “exotic”, “academic”, “never used in practice”, etc., etc. As software developers, we can solve any problem by adding one level of abstraction, and database modeling is not an exception. I’m going to show that any