[Term of the Day]: Normalization
Term of the Day
"Normalization"
What is Normalization?
Normalization is the process of organizing the database structure by splitting up the larger tables into smaller but meaningful tables. This process involves organizing, analyzing, and cleaning data to increase efficiency for data use and sharing. It usually includes data structuring and refinement, redundancy and error elimination, and standardization.
Here are some of the key benefits of normalizing a database:
- Minimizes null values
- Minimizes/avoids data modification issues.
- More compact database as it reduces data redundancy/null values.
- Simplifies queries.
- Cleaner database structure and easier to understand.
- Databases can be extended without necessarily impacting the existing data.
- Searching, sorting, and creating indexes can be faster, since tables are narrower, and more rows fit on a data page.