Automating table normalization - mysql

Question

I have a table with this structure (simplified):
artID: 1
artName: TNT
ArtBrand: ACME
...
And I want to normalize it making a separate table for the brand (it will have additional data about every brand)
So I want to end up with this
article table:
artID: 1
artName: TNT
brandID: 1
...
brand table
brandID: 1
brandName: ACME
brandInfo: xyz
....
This table have way too many brands to do this manually.
Any easy way to automate this?
I'm using MySQL

Answer 1

As the other answers suggested, you can use the INSERT ... SELECT syntax to do something like this:
INSERT INTO brands (brandName)
SELECT artBrand
FROM original
GROUP BY artBrand;
INSERT INTO articles (artName, brandID)
SELECT o.artName, b.brandID
FROM original o
JOIN brands b ON (b.brandName = o.artBrand);
Test case:
CREATE TABLE original (artID int, artName varchar(10), artBrand varchar(10));
CREATE TABLE articles (artID int auto_increment primary key, artName varchar(10), brandID int);
CREATE TABLE brands (brandID int auto_increment primary key, brandName varchar(10));
INSERT INTO original VALUES (1, 'TNT1', 'ACME1');
INSERT INTO original VALUES (2, 'TNT2', 'ACME1');
INSERT INTO original VALUES (3, 'TNT3', 'ACME1');
INSERT INTO original VALUES (4, 'TNT4', 'ACME2');
INSERT INTO original VALUES (5, 'TNT5', 'ACME2');
INSERT INTO original VALUES (6, 'TNT6', 'ACME3');
INSERT INTO original VALUES (7, 'TNT7', 'ACME3');
INSERT INTO original VALUES (8, 'TNT8', 'ACME3');
INSERT INTO original VALUES (9, 'TNT9', 'ACME4');
Result:
SELECT * FROM brands;
+---------+-----------+
| brandID | brandName |
+---------+-----------+
| 1 | ACME1 |
| 2 | ACME2 |
| 3 | ACME3 |
| 4 | ACME4 |
+---------+-----------+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)
ELECT * FROM articles;
+-------+---------+---------+
| artID | artName | brandID |
+-------+---------+---------+
| 1 | TNT1 | 1 |
| 2 | TNT2 | 1 |
| 3 | TNT3 | 1 |
| 4 | TNT4 | 2 |
| 5 | TNT5 | 2 |
| 6 | TNT6 | 3 |
| 7 | TNT7 | 3 |
| 8 | TNT8 | 3 |
| 9 | TNT9 | 4 |
+-------+---------+---------+
9 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Answer 2

I would use create table as select
... syntax to create the brands
table with generated id-s
create the brand_id column, and fill it up with the generated id-s from the brands table, using the existing brand columns in article table.
remove the brand columns from article table except of course brand_id
create the foreign key...

Answer 3

Generating brands table should be fairly simple:
CREATE TABLE brands (
id INT PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT,
brand_name VARCHAR(50),
brand_info VARCHAR(200)
);
INSERT INTO brands VALUES (brand_name)
SELECT ArtBrand FROM Table
GROUP BY ArtBrand;
Similar story with creating relations between your original table and new brands table, just that select statement in your insert will look like this:
SELECT t.artId, b.id
FROM table t JOIN brands b ON (t.ArtBrand = b.brand_name)