Comment by parpfish
8 hours ago
I always thought that the biggest benefit of normalization was deduplicating mutable values so you only need to update values in one place and everything stays nicely in sync.
Classic example being something like a “users” table that tracks account id, display name (mutable), and profile picture (mutable). And then a “posts” table that has post id, account id, and message text. This allows you to change the display name/picture in one place and it can be used across all posts
That is a practical benefit, absolutely. A different way of looking at it is that you’re eliminating data anomalies (generally, update anomalies).
This is usually the case when talking about normalization in the contex of relational databases (2nd normal form, 3rd normal form etc.). But normalization really just means to bring data into some standardized form.