Good top-down design methodologies tend to produce fully normalised designs anyway

Many database curricula both in University and in As and A2 examining boards teach normalisation by decomposition as a method of arriving at a suitable set of tables for implementation in a relational database. This paper advocates that we need to move on from this position and move towards teaching database design by developing a high level data model and then mapping the model to a set of tables suitable for implementation in a relational, object/relational or object oriented database