Rails’ migrations were a revelation when Rails came out, as it provided a way to manage your database schema, but also included many wonderful defaults that made all Rails developers pretty good at database schema design! But these defaults are just the beginning. Properly modeling your database can bring many benefits, such as fewer bugs, more reliable insights about your users or business, and developer understanding. We’ll talk about what makes a good database design by understanding the concept of normalization and why a properly normalized database yields benefits.