IN PERSON MEETING!!!!! Who Cares about Relational Database Design It has been nearly 45 years since the concept of a relational database management system (RDBMS) was written down by Edgar Codd. If you work with any technology besides databases, something written down 45 minutes ago may already be obsolete. So why does relational design still matter? I will answer that question by showing how to design a database, including the common normal forms and how they make data easy to work with (even if you are not using an RDBMS). Many typical database programming "difficulties" result from struggling against how data should be structured and can be avoided by applying basic normalization techniques. Most of these techniques are common sense, but some subtleties cause every designer to occasionally struggle with them, even when the code gives the correct answer (For example, why can't you write: WHERE ColumnName like '%son' and the optimizer figure out how to use an index?).