From the course: MySQL Database Administration

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Database normalization

Database normalization

- [Instructor] All right, the next concept that we'll cover in database design is database normalization. Normalization is the process of structuring your tables and columns so that they minimize redundancy and preserve data integrity. The benefits include eliminating duplicate data and reducing errors in anomalies. If you take a look at this data set here, you'll notice that a lot of our records contain duplicate data, which are highlighted. This is the important concept to understand. If you don't normalize your database, you're going to end up with tables that look like this. You'll have lots of redundant data, and that may not seem like a big deal now because we're only looking at 20 records, but imagine if you had millions of records in your database. You really need to structure it in a more efficient way, and that's what normalization is going to do. In practice, normalization involves breaking out data from one single merge table into multiple tables, which are related to each…

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