As shocking as this may be, not every team has a dedicated database administrator. I’ve never worked on a team that has had someone solely focused on making sure our queries are performant, and our tables are structured perfectly with all the forms of normalization being applied. Like many developers, I have had to learn difficult lessons about database design the hard way when under a lot of pressure to get something that’s broken fixed. In this article, we will go over how to normalize our database, how to use indexes to improve our performance and discuss using constraints to make sure that the data entered into our database follows our business rules. Knowing these three things will make our lives as developers who also administer databases easier.