Almost every application beyond the simplest tool needs to store and retrieve structured data reliably — IT2230 teaches the relational model and SQL, the dominant approach for doing exactly that for the past several decades.
Relational database concepts and normalization
IT2230 covers the relational model — organizing data into tables with defined relationships via primary and foreign keys — and normalization, the process of structuring tables to minimize data redundancy and prevent update anomalies. Students learn to recognize and fix common normalization violations, like storing the same customer address redundantly across multiple order records.
SQL fundamentals
The course teaches core SQL commands — SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, and JOIN operations for combining data across related tables — giving students the practical query-writing skills to actually interact with a relational database, not just understand its theoretical structure.
Key topics in IT2230
- The relational model: tables, primary keys, and foreign keys
- Normalization: 1NF, 2NF, 3NF, and preventing update/insert/delete anomalies
- Core SQL commands: SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE
- JOIN operations for combining data across related tables
- Entity-relationship diagrams (ERDs) for database design
- Basic database constraints: primary key, foreign key, unique, and not-null constraints
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Worked example: fixing a normalization violation
- Unnormalized design: A single "Orders" table stores customer name, address, and phone number redundantly on every order row for that customer
- Problem: If a customer's address changes, every order row must be updated, or the data becomes inconsistent (an update anomaly)
- Normalized design: Split into a "Customers" table (storing each customer's info once) and an "Orders" table (referencing the customer via a foreign key)
- Result: Updating a customer's address requires changing exactly one row, and all their orders automatically reflect the correct, current address
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Frequently asked questions
Normalization is the process of organizing a database's tables and columns to minimize data redundancy and prevent update, insertion, and deletion anomalies — following a series of increasingly strict normal forms (1NF, 2NF, 3NF, and beyond), each addressing a specific type of redundancy or dependency problem. IT2230 teaches normalization because an unnormalized database design — one that stores the same piece of information redundantly across multiple rows — creates real, costly problems: updating a piece of data (like a customer's address) requires finding and changing every redundant copy, and missing even one creates inconsistent, unreliable data. A properly normalized design stores each piece of information in exactly one place, referenced by relationships (foreign keys) wherever else it's needed, so updates only ever need to happen in a single location, dramatically reducing the risk of data inconsistency.
A JOIN operation combines rows from two or more tables based on a related column between them — typically a foreign key in one table matching a primary key in another — allowing a single query to retrieve data that's spread across multiple related tables as if it were one combined table. JOINs become necessary precisely because normalization deliberately splits data across multiple tables to avoid redundancy (customer information in one table, order information in another), meaning any query that needs to display combined information — like an order along with the customer's name and address — must use a JOIN to reassemble that related data from its separate, normalized tables at query time. IT2230 teaches JOIN operations as the essential counterpart to normalization: normalization keeps the stored data clean and non-redundant, while JOINs let queries flexibly reassemble whatever combined view of that data is actually needed for a given report or application screen.