In general no. Usually you have to know all the business rules that can be expressed in terms of functional dependencies before you can be sure whether a table violates one of 2NF, 3NF, EKNF, or BCNF. If you are worried about 4NF you also need to know all the business rules that can be expressed as multi-valued dependencies, and for 5NF you need to know all the business rules that could be expressed in terms of lossless join decompositions. Since the business rules may not be obvious from looking at the table, you may not be able to tell whether the table definition would allow any to be violated. There are some cases however where it is obvious that a table violates one of the normal forms - for example a computed column which is computed from a set of columns that doesn't include every column of some candidate key violates 3NF and every higher normal form).