Is normalizing a person's name going too far?

Question

You usually normalize a database to avoid data redundancy. It\'s easy to see in a table full of names that there is plenty of redundancy. If your goal is to create a catalog

Answer 1

Yes. I cannot think of an instance where the benefits outweigh the problems and query complications.

Answer 2

You often don't go over fourth form normalization in a database. Therefore seventh form normalization is quite a bit overboard. The only place this might even be a remotely plausible idea is in some kind of massive data warehouse.

Answer 3

I generally haven't seen a need to normalize the name, mainly because that adds a performance hit on the join that will always be called, and doesn't give any benefit.

If you have so many similar names, and have a storage problem then it may be worth it, but there will be a performance hit that would need to be considered.

Answer 4

I would say it is absolutely overkill. In most applications, you display folks' names so often, every query involved with that is going to look that much more complex and harder to read.

Answer 5

Yes, it's an overkill.

People don't change their names from Bill to Joe all at once.

Answer 6

Yes, it is. It is commonly recognized that just applying all of the Rules of Normalization can cause you to go way too far and end up with an overnormalized database. For example, it would be possible to normalize every instance of every character to a reference to a character enumeration table. It's easy to see that that's ridiculous.

Normalization needs to be performed at a level that is appropriate for your problem domain. Overnormalization is as much a problem as undernormalization (although, of course, for different reasons).