What is Normalization: Basics of Relational Databases

Normalization is a design procedure which provides a method for representing data and their relationships precisely in a tabular format that makes database easy to understand and operationally efficient.

Advantages of normalization -

1. Reduced data redundancy - Data redundancy means the repetition of data in a table. This is undesirable since data maintenance becomes a tedious job as more and more records are added to the table.

2.Protection against update and delete anomalies - Update and delete anomalies: The tables which are normalized will contain primary and foreign keys. To maintain data integrity and referential integrity constraints, RDBMS instructs us to insert primary key values into a table at any given point of time but foreign keys can be inserted into any table if and only if the corresponding primary key value is already existing. This helps in maintaining data integrity and referential integrity constraints.

Similarly, with delete anomalies a primary key value will be deleted unconditionally only if any dependencies does not exist for that key.

3.Smaller tables - A table will be split into many smaller tables when it is normalized