What is the main goal of data normalization in a relational database?

The main goal of data normalization in a relational database is to eliminate redundancy and update anomalies. Normalization divides data into related tables so that each table contains data about a single type of entity, and relationships between them are expressed through keys.

This allows:

• To avoid data duplication
• To ensure data integrity
• To simplify updating, inserting, and deleting without errors

For example, instead of storing information about customers and their orders in one table, data is separated into a customers table and an orders table, linked by a customer key.