I’ve had one session accepted at the 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo (which is a good thing since I only submitted one session for nomination).

This year’s session is titled How to be Normal, a Guide for Developers. I decided to return to my old Normalization talk, but lean more towards the practical than the theoretical this year and work on common scenarios faced by developers rather than walk a person through the normal forms like I have previously done.

Here’s the abstract I’ll be sending in to replace the ugly one I submitted with:

At some point in every software project involving a database it becomes necessary for the developers who created (or inherited) the project to step back and take a look at their database. Many projects have a database schema that has evolved over time, with columns added here and tables added there, increasing complexity and often adding redundancy. Super-tables grow with more and more columns making ALTERs slow and backups difficult.

In this session MySQL author and speaker Mike Hillyer will guide the audience through the principles of database normalization and review some common normalization scenarios encountered by many application developers.

Topics include:

• What is normalization and what are its benefits?
• What are the normal forms?
  • First Normal Form
  • Second Normal Form
  • Third Normal Form
  • And so on…
• Normalization Scenarios
• Relationships and Joins
• How Much is Too Much?

This session is intended for a beginner to intermediate audience and is applicable to developers and administrators who deal with database design.

The Normalization talks are always well received and cover important principles, hopefully if you’re at the conference you can come in and participate.