Question

I am not a database guy, but am trying to clean up another database. So my question is would normalizing the gender table be going too far?

User table:
userid int pk,
genderid char(1) fk
etc...

gender table:
genderid char(1) pk,
gender varchar(20)

Now at first it seemed silly to me, but then I considered it because i can then have a constant data source to populate from or bind from. I will be using WPF. If it was another framework I would probably avoid it, but what do you think?

Answer 1

Whether or not you choose to normalize your table structure to accomodate gender is going to depend on the requirements of your application and your business requirements.

I would normalize if:

• You want to be able to manage the “description” of a gender in the database, and not in code.
  • This allows you to quickly change the description from Man/Woman to Male/Female, for example.
• Your application currently must handle, or will possible handle in the future, localization requirements, i.e. being able to specify gender in different languages.
• Your business requires that everything be normalized.

I would not normalize if:

• You have a relatively simple application where you can easily manage the description of the gender in code rather than in the database.
• You have tight programmatic control of the data going in and out of the gender field such that you can ensure consistency of the data in that field.
• You only care about the gender field for information capture, meaning, you don’t have a lot of programmatic need to update this field once it is set the first time.