A normalized database contains no duplication of column information across multiple records. Instead, a record in one table has a primary key and is also associated with one or many records from another table based on a foreign key relationship. One possible scenario in which a normalized database is not necessary is one in which there will be tables that contain only a few records. To avoid too many tables with many one-to-one relationships, it can be beneficial to merge information from the normal multiple table format into a single table, even if information across multiple rows is duplicated.