What process do data professionals use to eliminate data redundancy, increase data integrity, and reduce complexity in a database?

• A. Indexing
• B. Normalization
• C. Denormalization
• D. Aggregation

Answer: (B)

Data professionals use normalization to organize data into related tables so that each fact is stored in one place. This eliminates repeated data, which reduces redundancy, and it enforces data integrity because updates, deletions, and insertions occur only in their single, correct location. By breaking the database into logical entities and using primary keys to identify records and foreign keys to define relationships, the structure becomes clearer and easier to maintain, and changes don’t create inconsistencies elsewhere.

Indexing speeds up data retrieval but doesn’t address how data is stored or related. Denormalization does the opposite by reintroducing redundancy to optimize performance, which increases, not reduces, redundancy. Aggregation is about summarizing data, not about organizing the underlying schema.