Re: A database design question

Sanjay Rallapally wrote:
>
> Its me again,
> I am curious abut the level of database normalization that is followd
> in the real-world . How rigidly do u guys follow the database design
> rules regarding normalization? Lastly, when is it better to have an
> unnormalized table, than an unnormalized one? I mean, how useful are
> indexes as against having a normalizzed table
>

I always used 3NF. We once tried some denormalisation but the access wasn't significant faster. Instead, the admininstrational effort increased. We normalised again.

We now have to work with a system using surrugate keys for every table because of the oo-appliction. I get sick of it.
To minimize the joins we denormalised a lot - just puting the name (normally the primary key) and the surrogate key (current primary key) together in the referencing table.

Beware of surrogate keys! Received on Thu Jul 31 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT