Normalizing vs. Denormalizing
Date: 1996/03/16
Message-ID: <4ifaml$fpc_at_newsbf02.news.aol.com>#1/1
I'm in the process of helping to develop an Oracle database for a plant
that's very concerned with speed. They enter about 5000 orders per month
and each order is one record (no detail lines). Since I took the Oracle
classes, I have the normalization techniques down pretty well, but my
concern is the time that it would take in disk reads in order to access
the several tables required to normalize this company's orders. (Each
order should store information into several tables that would have 4-5
sets of 5-10 pieces of data each, for a total of about 35 denormalized
columns.) If I denormalize the data, it would reduce the number of disk
reads and all of the information should be fairly contiguous, but it seems
to me that that would defeat the purpose of a relational database.
Does anyone have any ideas on where you would draw the line?