Question

A relation Employee(EmpID, Skill, Language) records that an employee can have multiple independent skills and can speak multiple independent languages, with no relationship between which specific skill pairs with which specific language. If every Skill-Language combination for each employee is stored as a separate row, which normal form is violated?

Q: Answer-A relation Employee(EmpID, Skill, Language) records that an employee can have multiple independent s...

This is the classic scenario of a multi-valued dependency an employees set of skills and set of languages are independent of one another, yet storing both in the same relation forces every possible skill-language combination to be recorded a cross product, introducing significant redundancy. This is precisely the condition that defines a 4NF violation, and it is resolved by decomposing the relation into two separate relations Employee-Skill and Employee-Language each capturing one independent multi-valued fact.