Wow, thanks everyone! This makes way more sense now—especially the closet analogy lol.
I tried normalizing a dummy dataset in SQLite like some of you suggested, and it’s already feeling cleaner. Still wrapping my head around when to denormalize, though.
Quick follow-up: Any rule of thumb for when to stop normalizing? Like, is 3NF usually enough for most apps?
(Also, big thanks for the tool recs—Lucidchart’s been a lifesaver!)
I tried normalizing a dummy dataset in SQLite like some of you suggested, and it’s already feeling cleaner. Still wrapping my head around when to denormalize, though.
Quick follow-up: Any rule of thumb for when to stop normalizing? Like, is 3NF usually enough for most apps?
(Also, big thanks for the tool recs—Lucidchart’s been a lifesaver!)