Creating and Deriving Data

Storing your data in the database is only half the story. The other half is making that data available to users in ways they can comprehend. When you extract data from the database, either in a report format or one row at a time on a data maintenance page, the values in each row are often not suitable for display for a number of reasons. Usually, your data is highly normalized for performance and maintenance reasons — storing each part of a name in a different column or using a numeric code set that references the full text descriptions in another table. Other normalization-related scenarios include storing numeric quantities or prices across several rows or within several columns in the same row, and not storing a sum or other transformations within the table.