Simplifying Database Normalization within a Visual Interactive Simulation Model

Although many researchers focused on investigating the challenges of database normalization, and suggested recommendations on easing these challenges, this process remained an area of concern to database designers, developers, and learners. This paper investigated these challenges and involved Higher Education in Computer Science students learning database normalization, as they could well represent beginning database designers/developers, who would struggle in effectively normalize their database design due to the complexity of this theoretical process, which has no similar real-life representation. The paper focused on the advantages of interactive visualization techniques to simplify database normalization, and recommended virtual world technologies, such as ‘Second Life’, as an effective platform to achieve this visualization via a simulated model of a relational database system. The simulation technique presented in this paper is novel, and is supported by extensive evidence on its advantages to achieve an illustration of the ‘Normal Forms’ and the need for them.