Sarah Lea<p>Why normalize databases?<br />Yesterday, my tutoring student asked me why databases need to be normalized at all. She said: “Wouldn’t it be easier to just have one big table with all the information?”</p><p>It’s a common first question when learning about relational databases.<br />At first, one big table (e.g. customer name, order date, product name, price) seems easiest.</p><p>I told her:<br />:blobcoffee: Because that quickly leads to data redundancy, anomalies, and integrity issues when inserting, updating, or deleting records.<br />:blobcoffee: Normalization means structuring data into separate, related tables, so that each fact is stored only once. This reduces redundancy & preserves consistency.</p><p><a href="https://techhub.social/tags/databases" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>databases</span></a> <a href="https://techhub.social/tags/dataengineering" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>dataengineering</span></a> <a href="https://techhub.social/tags/datascience" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>datascience</span></a> <a href="https://techhub.social/tags/datascientist" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>datascientist</span></a> <a href="https://techhub.social/tags/dataanalysis" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>dataanalysis</span></a> <a href="https://techhub.social/tags/dataanalyst" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>dataanalyst</span></a> <a href="https://techhub.social/tags/sql" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>sql</span></a> <a href="https://techhub.social/tags/data" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>data</span></a></p>