Advantages and Disadvantages of Normalization

Advantages of Normalization:

1. Normalization reduces the unnecessary redundant data.

2. Data integrity is easily maintained within the database.

3. It makes database and application design processes much more flexible.

Disadvantages of Normalization:

1. Difficult and expansive

2. It requires a detailed database design

3. Maintenance overhead

The main disadvantage of normalization is that it produces so many tables with a small number of columns and these columns have to be joined using their primary key or foreign key. Those relationships put the information back together so we can use it.

Example: A query may be to retrieve data from multiple normalized tables. This can result in complicated table joins.