Introduction -to- Ecology

A course covering population, community, and ecosystem ecology for undergraduates

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Database Structure

Notes

Five basic rules of database structure

  1. Order doesn’t matter
    • The information should not be dependent on the order of the rows or the order of the columns
  2. No duplicate rows
  3. Every row - column combination contains one value
  4. One field per type of information
  5. No redundant information

Order doesn’t matter

Order of rows doesn't matter example

No duplicate rows

No duplicate rows example

One value per cell

Don’t do this.

One value per cell example

How would you query for Shrubland?

One column per type of information

Don’t do this either.

One column per type of information example

How would you query for records with Grassland and Shrubland?

Proper structure

How to restructure to keep no duplicate rows and one value per cell

This lets us easily subset the data however we want.

No redundant information

No redundant information example