Talk:Relational Database Design/Normalization

I believe that beginners may be confused by the statement that, if A determines B, this means that "if you know A, you know B", because that is often literally not true. I may know someone's unique identifier (their passport number, say), but not know their birthdate. It's not even true to say that we "can know" B, because we may not be able to find it out. Rather, I would propose saying that when there is a functional dependency of B on A, it just means that for any given A, there can be at most one B. A person has one, and only one, birthdate, regardless of whether we know it, or even can know it, or not. Doug1943 (discuss • contribs) 15:48, 31 January 2014 (UTC)