Redundancy Overload Is Optional: Finding the FDs That Actually Matter
Tables have a talent for pretending to be tidy. A customer table may have fifty columns. A transaction table may have a hundred. A log table may contain derived fields, timestamps, status codes, copied identifiers, normalized labels, and a few columns that nobody remembers creating but everybody is afraid to delete. Then a data profiling tool arrives, dutifully discovers functional dependencies, and returns several hundred thousand “valid” relationships. ...