Normalization is necessary for reducing redundancy and ensuring that only relevant information is kept in each table. There are also no complications arising from the addition, deletion, and updating of data in the database. In addition, it is beneficial to break down a large database table into multiple tables and connect them using relationships. A table that is not normalized will contain the same information in several rows. Since this implies that the table on insert has a lot more information than it needs and updates are not applied to all of its other records, inconsistent data is a risk (Milicev, 2021). The deletion of one record may mistakenly destroy data from a second unit wrongly linked to the first. Normalization ensures a more flexible database and data consistency.
Relationships should first be in the 1NF to qualify to be in 2NF. Suppose there is no valid subgroup of any primary keys of the table that relies on any proper subgroup of any non-prime character (attributes not included in any applicant key). In that case, the relation is in the second normal form (Wang & Stantic, 2019). Partial dependence occurs when the correct subset of candidate keys dictates the non-prime property.
There must be no transitive reliance on non-prime qualities for a relationship to be in the third form. Column references that are not reliant on the primary key should be included in 3NF. A third normal type of data normalization is essential since it helps reduce the amount of data redundancy. Additionally, this helps to guarantee that the database’s data is accurate. It will also aid in the database’s organization. Every non-trivial function must satisfy at least one of the following conditions for a relationship in 3NF.
- The dependence A –> B
- A is a super key.
- B is a prime attribute.
- A->C is a transitive dependence if “A->B and B->C” are two functional relationships.
In conclusion, data normalization’s advantages extend well beyond reducing disk space and its associated impacts. Changing and updating data in the database will be a lot simpler if one follows this procedure. As a result, the data is more precise and easier to work with because of the absence of redundancies and mistakes. One should not disregard data normalization if one uses a database, which is the case with practically all businesses these days.
References
Milicev, D. (2021). Hyper-relations: A model for denormalization of transactional relational databases. IEEE transactions on knowledge & data engineering, Vol 01, 1-1. Web.
Wang, J., & Stantic, B. (2019). Facilitating learning by practice and examples: a tool for learning table normalization. In Proceedings of the 9th Balkan conference on informatics (pp. 1-4). Web.