Re: To De-Normalize or Normalize ?

Christian Roig wrote in message <360a208f.11106841_at_news.tele.dk>...
>How do you get faster response-times from queries ?
>
>Some people argue that you
>
>A)
>have to De-Normalize your database, so that you have fewer joins, which in
 turn
>results in faster response-times from your queries.
>
>B)
>have to Normalize your database, so that you can have more data in memory,
 which
>in turn results in faster response-times from your queries.
>
>
>What is YOUR experience ?
>
>Why and/or When do YOU either De-Normalize or Normalize your database ?
>
>TIA - Christian

Don't these decisions depend on what you are doing? Example: a colleague of mine did some OLTP performance work a few years ago. One organisation that he worked-with (a large international airline) denormalised tables so much that everything ended-up in one table! (about 100 million rows). Further info on his work at:

http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~akmal/html.dir/citybm.html

His papers will be put on-line in the near future, but the OLTP source-code is currently available from the above page if you want to have a look at the transactions, indexes, etc.

Regards,

akmal

--
email: akmal(at)bigfoot(dot)com
http://www.bigfoot.com/~akmal/