Is Normalizing a Database Just Manual Compression?
Michael explores the idea:
But it's the 21st century and it dawned on me that normalization is the futile act of trying to manually compress data. If you break up your data records in to its related component parts to -avoid duplicate data- then you're literally trying to re-invent compression ..badly.
Comments
Re: Is Normalizing a Database Just Manual Compression?
[anonymous] July 15, 2010 17:37:41.766
From Wikipedia on data normalization: "In the field of relational database design, normalization is a systematic way of ensuring that a database structure is suitable for general-purpose querying and free of certain undesirable characteristics—insertion, update, and deletion anomalies—that could lead to a loss of data integrity."
Consider one case: Removing a single datum squirreled away in multiple places in an un-normalized data store. What do you do next if deleting the 3rd of five instances fails?