Advantages and Disadvantages of Normalization Essay Example
Advantages and Disadvantages of Normalization Essay Example

Advantages and Disadvantages of Normalization Essay Example

Available Only on StudyHippo
  • Pages: 3 (668 words)
  • Published: December 5, 2017
  • Type: Essay
View Entire Sample
Text preview

advantages and disadvantages of normalization. The process of normalization brings about organization to the database that it is applied to. Normalization makes everyone’s job easier due to the fact that it gets rid of as much useless data as possible. Repeated data is processed and simplified into single data.

Repeated data, for example such as having someone named JOHN DOE in one table and the same person’s name JOHNNY M. DOE in another table.Modifying a table with as little data as possible is much easier than modifying a huge table with all the information that the database has. Normalization breaks the database down into smaller tables making it much easier for database users and administrators to save disk space and simplify their structures of data. Throughout the process of normalization, security also becomes easier to control. The database administrator

...

can determine which users have access to certain tables.

Another advantage of normalization is that it provides indexing.Indexing speeds up the access of data, increase delete, update, and insert performance. Normalization also minimizes modification anomalies. Modification anomalies can occur when the data is deleted, inserted, or updated, and the data is lost in other ways such as hardware being damaged or stolen. In addition, normalization helps with the reduction of table and row size.

Creating primary and foreign key constraints will reduce the number of empty or null values in columns and reduces the overall size of the database.Normalization has yet another great advantage, referential integrity. Referential Integrity means that one column Data 3 in a table has to relate to a column in another table. It is the ability to take important information or relate

View entire sample
Join StudyHippo to see entire essay

data from one table to another through a similar attribute. For example, in order for an employee to have a record in the PAY_TBL table, that employee would have to have a record in the EMPLOYEE_TBL table. Referential Integrity is controlled using foreign and primary keys.

In addition to normalization having many advantages, there are also many disadvantages. The main disadvantage to normalization is the reduction of the overall database performance. A database that has been normalized requires much more memory, CPU, and input/output usage to process database queries and transactions. The database must then join the data from the requested tables after they are located to get the requested data or information. Another disadvantage of normalization is say that you have a telephone call log and a firewall log.You want to store both types of logs in the same database.

What you have to do is take all the fields from both logs and build the database schema. This will result in a fairly large set of fields. If you keep adding new types of data sources, your database schema gets bigger. Extending the outline of your database can be very hard. You have to decide what your database will look like and at anytime later on, if there are any adjustments to be made you would have to go back and adjust the whole outline.A downside to Normalization is of course it takes time, which can sometimes cost the developer more money.

Time, which can also be used to further examine the overall structure of the database. Yet another downside to normalization is that data entries can change. Companies constantly release newer versions of

their products, and it Data 4 either changes some of its entry logs or adds new types of data. The parsers would have to be updated to show that they support the new data entries, before the data source can be used again.One last disadvantage is that the original data entry is no longer available. Unless of course, you somehow have the original data entry stored somewhere.

References Agile data. (2007). A Database Best Practice. Retrieved January 30, 2008 from http://www. agiledata. org/ Server Watch.

(2007). Database Normalization. Retrieved January 31, 2008 from http://www. serverwatch. com/tutorials/article.

php Tech Trax. (2007). Normalizing Access Data. Retrieved January 31, 2008 from http://pubs.

logicalexpressions. com/Pub0009

Get an explanation on any task
Get unstuck with the help of our AI assistant in seconds
New