Drawbacks of Multivalued Attributes
- Data Integrity Challenges: Regarding the rules of data integrity, handling of multivalued attributes may also create some difficulties in the proper management of data consistency; while modifying or removing some data, it may lead to the modifying of one or several more associated values that will potentially create inconsistency.
- Query Complexity: While using search and update queries on records associated with multivalued attributes most often necessitate more complex SQL statements or some sort of software logic that sometimes can prove disadvantageous in development and support.
- Normalization Overhead: Depending on the specified multivalued attributes, the normalization process will lead to higher costs of having greater number of tables as well as relation. This can result in making the query complicated and possibly resulting to poor performance since in most cases, more joins are used and cross-references are implemented among tables.
Multivalued Attributes in DBMS
Attributes are significant in DBMS as it deals with the organization and formatting of data. Of all the attributes, multivalued attributes are somewhat different and they have to be understood properly. To help us understand the above idea in the subsequent sections of this article, we will also explain related key terminologies, and how multivalued attributes work with the help of examples.