Final answer:
Normalization is a database design technique that organizes data to reduce redundancy and dependency, enhancing data integrity and consistency. It involves creating tables that reflect relationships and contain no duplicate information, avoiding update, insertion, and deletion anomalies.
Step-by-step explanation:
Normalization is a process in database design that organizes data to minimize redundancy and dependency, which resolves the data integrity problem. By dividing a database into multiple tables and defining relationships among them, normalization assures that only related data is stored in a table. There are several forms of normal forms, each with its own rules to address data anomalies.
Benefits of Normalization
- Elimination of redundant data: Reduces data duplication and storage costs.
- Improved data integrity: Ensures accuracy and consistency of data through controlled data entry.
- Assured consistency during update operations: Minimizes the risk of data becoming inconsistent because changes are made in just one place.
By employing normalization, a database avoids problems like update anomalies, where changes to data in one place do not propagate correctly to other places. Furthermore, it prevents insertion anomalies, where the inability to add data to the database without adding other, unrelated data occurs. Lastly, it prohibits deletion anomalies that could result in loss of all information about an entity when a record is deleted.