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I know Normalization means reducing redundancy in data sets but what is the definition of normalized data?

Can I describe it as the "simplest form" of a data set?

philipxy
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Rogue
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  • Do you mean "normalized data" as in database normalization of tables or its general math meaning as in "normal form" or "canonical form"? What is wrong with the Wikipedia entry for the kind of normalization you mean? What is your application/context? – philipxy Jul 26 '16 at 05:28
  • @philipxy because I have a set of data in excel to be used for data visualization. Right now I have to do a presentation and I was wondering if i could use the term "normalized data" to describe the dataset in excel, which is just rows and columns of raw data. I understand wikipedia's explanation however I was just wondering if I could use the same term to describe excel's data. – Rogue Jul 28 '16 at 05:38
  • You seem to mean *database* "normalization". But you likely want the (database) term "relational". A relational table has no duplicate rows, no duplicate column names, no order to its rows, no order to its columns and no NULLs. An SQL table sadlly can have duplicate rows, can have duplicate column names, has an order to its columns, and can have NULLs. "Normalized" applies to *relational tables*. It originally meant no row-column values were relational tables, but is now typically wrong-headedly used to mean no column types are somehow not a single value. – philipxy Jul 28 '16 at 07:54
  • So you pretty much are left with "tablular" data. Ie data in table form. Unless you are restricting your use of Excel tables to what you could do with relational tables, per my list of "no"s above, in which case it is "relational (tabular)" data, or ditto for "SQL (tablular)" data. Also, "normalized" is also used to refer to relational tables that are restricted to certain "normal forms", in which case every relation is "normalized" to at least 1st Normal Form, ie is "normalized". PS Re "I understand wikipedia's explanation": *Which* definition of "normalized" are you talking about?? – philipxy Jul 28 '16 at 08:08

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Normalization is not necessarily related to redundancy. It’s related to reduction. For instance, in my daily code, normalizing is more about mapping big intervals into [0;1]. Although data normalization might have a general meaning for database administrators, it doesn’t have one if you look at it without a context.

phaazon
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