After this brief introduction to organizing columns, it makes sense to discuss various other issues, such as choosing the right data type and normalization. Normalization is a standard technique to organize data and it has proven to be essential over the years. The idea is to avoid redundancy to ensure that changes only have to be made in one place. To make your database project a success, deciding on proper types is essential and will help to prevent a great deal of trouble later on in the project. The goal of this chapter is to make you aware of the potentials of using the right types.

test=# CREATE TABLE t_product (
  prodnr     int,
  name       varchar(20),
  description...