2024-09-09 · Imani Brooks
Normalization debates that are actually about names
When third normal form is fine but vocabulary is not.
Teams argue normal forms while the real issue is ambiguous nouns. "Customer" might mean billing account, login identity, or shipment recipient. Until you write those definitions, indexes will keep fighting you.
Run a ninety-minute workshop with sticky notes — yes, analog — listing every table name participants disagree on. Photograph the wall. That artifact becomes the seed for a lightweight glossary PR.
We are not precious about perfect ontologies. We are insistent that mismatched words do not ship as mismatched foreign keys.
Tags: Modeling, Teamwork