If two files have similarly name fields that will contain the same data, then one is redundant. If two files will contian different data in similarly name fields, then niether is redundant. That makes sense! Normalizing is a natural art, not something that needs to be senthisized or over-analyzed. Thats one of the neat things about systems development, you can edit to correct. Real time art, like music, is not so forgivoing. You play a bad note, and everyone remembers it:)

>>Our discussion has been about maintaining tax rates in the customer header.
>
>Terry,
>
>Your discussion has been about this issue, the discussion that was going on was about when is data redundant and when is it not redundant (you just latched on to the example that was being used). Here's a totally different example to demonstrate the issue at hand in the previous discussion;
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>

>Customer Table
>CustID  PK
>Name
>Phone
>
>Contacts Table
>ContactID  PK
>Name
>CustID     FK to Customer
>Phone
>

>
>Is the Phone attribute in the contacts table redundant? It depends! If the domain definition for the two phone fields is different than it is not redundant. For example, if the Customer.Phone is defiend as the Main contact phone number for this customer and the Contact.Phone field is defined as the direct phone for this contact, then these attributes are NOT redundant.