Algorithm to organize table into many tables to have less cells?

I'm not really trying to compress a database. This is more of a logical problem. Is there any algorithm that will take a data table with lots of columns and repeated data and find a way to organize it into many tables with ID's in such a way that in total there are 开发者_高级运维as few cells as possible, and that this tables can be then joined with a query to replicate the original one.

I don't care about any particular database engine or language. I just want to see if there is a logical way of doing it. If you will post code, I like C# and SQL but you can use any.

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I don't know of any automated algorithms but what you really need to do is heavily normalize your database. This means looking at your actual functional dependencies and breaking this off wherever it makes sense.

The problem with trying to do this in a computer program is that it isn't always clear if your current set of stored data represents all possible problem cases. You can't only look at numbers of values either. It makes little sense to break off booleans into their own table because they have only two values, for example, and this is only the tip of the iceberg.

I think that at this point, nothing is going to beat good ol' patient, hand-crafted normalization. This is something to do by hand. Any possible computer algorithm will either make a total mess of things or make you define the relationships such that you might as well do it all yourself.