Third normal form (3NF) is a database schema design approach for relational databases which uses normalizing principles to reduce the duplication of data, avoid data anomalies, ensure referential integrity, and simplify data management. It was defined in 1971 by Edgar F. Codd, an English computer scientist who invented the relational model for database management.
A database relation (e.g. a database table) is said to meet third normal form standards if all the attributes (e.g. database columns) are functionally dependent on solely a key, except the case of functional dependency whose right hand side is a prime attribute (an attribute which is strictly included into some key). Codd defined this as a relation in second normal form where all non-prime attributes depend only on the candidate keys and do not have a transitive dependency on another key.[1]
A hypothetical example of a failure to meet third normal form would be a hospital database having a table of patients which included a column for the telephone number of their doctor. (The phone number is dependent on the doctor, rather than the patient, thus would be better stored in a table of doctors.) The negative outcome of such a design is that a doctor's number will be duplicated in the database if they have multiple patients, thus increasing both the chance of input error and the cost and risk of updating that number should it change (compared to a third normal form-compliant data model that only stores a doctor's number once on a doctor table).
Codd later realized that 3NF did not eliminate all undesirable data anomalies and developed a stronger version to address this in 1974, known as Boyce–Codd normal form.