Fourth normal form

The table has no non-key attributes because its only candidate key is {Restaurant, Pizza variety, Delivery area}.

The problem is that the table features two non-trivial multivalued dependencies on the {Restaurant} attribute (which is not a superkey).

There is, moreover, nothing to prevent us from doing this incorrectly: we might add Cheese Crust rows for all but one of A1 Pizza's delivery areas, thereby failing to respect the multivalued dependency {Restaurant}

To eliminate the possibility of these anomalies, we must place the facts about varieties offered into a different table from the facts about delivery areas, yielding two tables that are both in 4NF: In contrast, if the pizza varieties offered by a restaurant sometimes did legitimately vary from one delivery area to another, the original three-column table would satisfy 4NF.

A 1992 paper by Margaret S. Wu notes that the teaching of database normalization typically stops short of 4NF, perhaps because of a belief that tables violating 4NF (but meeting all lower normal forms) are rarely encountered in business applications.

Wu reports that in a study of forty organizational databases, over 20% contained one or more tables that violated 4NF while meeting all lower normal forms.

[3] Only in rare situations does a 4NF table not conform to the higher normal form 5NF.