Question

In a library database, where would you have the potential for repeating groups? What are the potential problems? Explain.

Answer 1

Explanation of where the potential for repeating groups would be in a library database:

It is a phenomenon or a problem of repeating the same set or series of information in a database.

Repeating groups, in general, are found in the fields with multiple values in databases used in libraries, companies, businesses, etc.
However, repeating values would be found in another table.
Repeating values would be removed.
There should not be repeating groups in the data.
There would not be repeating groups or multi-valued fields that are also called non-atomic attribute, each field would be as small as possible, and each table would have a key.

First Normal Form (1NF) of normalization eliminates and does not have repeating groups.

What potential problems are experienced:
In the library database, which is related mainly to books, and these books, for example, would have fields such as:
Title, Author, ISBN, Price, Publisher, Category, Edition, Language, etc.
The potential problems would be:
The Author field would cause a problem as many books have multiple authors.
The category field could be many such as, thriller, crime, action, adult, horror, etc.

One of the potential problems of repeating groups is they restrict your database's extension limit you try to include all related information.
The second problem is un-normalized database designs waste space.
Another problem could be when one of the fields in the table is not atomic, as it may contain multiple values splittable, making this design preventing effectively sorting or searching on the data.
Hence, to eliminate the repeating group, it is required to create a new entity and form a relationship between the entities.
Repeating groups in libraries, organizations, businesses, etc., cause data redundancy and inconsistency, huge efforts, difficulties, time consumption, potential risks, mistakes, errors, damages, incorrect or wrong manipulation of the data, and data loss problems.
* There are potential problems when it is required to update the records where the exact same set or series of information are present in multiple areas.