This article summarizes a very high-level overview of the common data handling techniques used in distributed environments along with some of their key points and advantages.
Normalization
Remember those old days of RDBMS where we used to organize the associative set of columns in the same table with a foreign key as referential entities, mostly to reduce the redundancy of data across different tables? For example, instead of putting 'employee_ name' column in employee's personal_detail table and address_detail table, we used to keep it in personal_details only, whereas 'emp_id' can be a foreign key in the address_detail table.