How to Use PostgreSQL for Data Normalization

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Managing a database is more than just storing information—it’s about storing data efficiently, effectively, and balancing trade-offs. We can employ techniques like data normalization to optimize our data for maintainability and readability, or data denormalization to optimize for raw query speed. Data normalization is the process of breaking data down into structured tables to reduce duplication and make it easier to query and store by enforcing standardization.

In this article, we’ll take a look at what data normalization is, how to apply normal forms to achieve data normalization, challenges and tools for data normalization in PostgreSQL, tips on when to denormalize, and how TimescaleDB makes normalization easier.