I'm reminded of being 18, my first year of college, and I had this lovely database professor who was good with crowds. He'd get us all to memorize and repeat, as a group certain phrases.
"Why do we normalize?"
150 students, in unison: "To make better relations"
"And why do we DE-normalize?"
150 students, in unison: "Performance"
"And what is a database?"
150 students, in unison: "A self-describing set of integrated records"
That was 16 years ago, and I'm still able to say those answers verbatim.
Maybe to someone who could make sense of the DDL and read the language the label col names are written in. And understand all the implicit units, rules around nulls/empties, and presence of magic strings (SSN, SKU) and special numbers (-1) and on and on. For that you need something like RDF and a proper data model.
Aren't you conflating the lexicon of data management with specific implementations of a relational database management system (RDBMS)?
Sorry, but your response sounds snarky and reminds me of all the ego hurdles I had to overcome when leaving/loving databases and set theory. Please remember that your comment could be someone's first introduction or step early step in learning.
If you use Oracle, PostgreSQL or MySQL (those are the ones I'm familliar) you can always query the data dictionary and see how your tables relate. For me that is self-describing.
"Why do we normalize?"
150 students, in unison: "To make better relations"
"And why do we DE-normalize?"
150 students, in unison: "Performance"
"And what is a database?"
150 students, in unison: "A self-describing set of integrated records"
That was 16 years ago, and I'm still able to say those answers verbatim.