Western Governors University (WGU) ITEC2116 D426 Data Management - Foundations Practice Exam

Data redundancy refers to the unnecessary duplication of data within a database. This situation arises when the same piece of information is stored in multiple places within the database or across different databases. While certain redundancy can be beneficial for performance or data retrieval purposes, excessive redundancy can lead to various issues such as increased storage costs, data inconsistencies, and complications in data management.

In practice, managing data redundancy is crucial to ensure data integrity and optimize storage utilization. Reducing redundancy is a key goal in database normalization processes, which aim to organize data efficiently and eliminate unnecessary duplication while maintaining the relationships between different data entities. Thus, the concept of data redundancy is primarily characterized by the presence of duplicate data, which can hinder effective database operations and management.