Why Is Data Redundancy Bad?

Any good MS Access Database Developer or Consultant would know that database redundancy is a big problem for any database, large or small. It might not be immediately obvious to laypeople as to why exactly data redundancy is so bad, there’s a bunch of reasons ranging from the obvious to the not so obvious.

Arguably the worst part of data redundancy is the fact that the database are unnecessarily larger this might not seem like such a problem these days with our 2TB HDD, but it was a huge problem not too long ago when space was an important commodity. But hand in hand with larger file sizes is slower speeds and that is still a concern for people these days, particularly clients who wouldn’t be too happy knowing that a poor database developer or consultant allowed a easily fixable problem that affects profits get past them.

There is also the issue that the database has to be updated in more than one place; just a simple mistake could have two different values for the same record, which could cause catastrophic failures in the database, and depending on the use of the database could cause thousands of dollars of damage or even worse, could put lives at risk through something easily avoided with through planning.