Technical Wording help (not code) (1 Viewer)

[blacksaibot]

I need help putting this into technical terminology:

Our database "admin team" designed database to house survey questions. The problem is they gave every single question its own column and every single answer its own column. Essential an entire survey for one person is stored in a single data row.

I've seen survey databases before and each row represents a question and its response. I remember learning its better to have many rows rather than too many columns. I also know that the way they set this up is bad database design practice, but I don't know the technical terminology to describe this.

Can anyone help me out? Thanks

 

[pbaldy]

The word you're looking for is "normalization", or variants of it. That database is not "normalized". It's not designed to x "normal" form.

http://www.r937.com/Relational.html

 

[blacksaibot]

Okay... but the table is not redundant at all. It just shoves too many things into one record. So I'm not sure how normalization is really the answer.

 

[pbaldy]

Read the section titled First Normal Form.