database - Is normalizing a person's name going too far?

Question

You usually normalize a database to avoid data redundancy. It's easy to see in a table full of names that there is plenty of redundancy. If your goal is to create a catalog of the names of every person on the planet (good luck), I can see how normalizing names could be beneficial. But in the context of the average business database is it overkill?

(Of course I know you could take anything to an extreme... say if you normalized down to syllables... or even adjacent character pairs. I can't see a benefit in going that far)

Update:

One possible justification for this is a random name generator. That's all I could come up with off the top of my head.

Answer 1

Yes, it's an overkill.

People don't change their names from Bill to Joe all at once.