Re: The problem with denormalization.

Laconic2 wrote:

> I recently ran into a place called the "Database design Blog". In the
> first article I scanned, I read the following:
>
> "Normalize until it hurts, denormalize until it works."
>
> There is some truth to this saying, but it suffers from the same problem
> as
> all the other advice about denormalization: it doesn't tell you what to
> do.
> It reminds me of the advice on how to get out of Witt's end: "don't go
> west".
>

Yeah, it's the old loophole problem, if you give some people a loophole, they'll drive a truck through it.

Third normal form is just me ole granny's advice to have a place for everything and everything in its place. As has been said in this thread, once you have the knack of organizing data, it tends to fall into at least 3NF automatically.

For my part, after laying out the design and checking for mistakes that violate 3NF, I then denormalize by adding redundant derived columns, because this has always brought wonderful results in practice.

Can't say as I've ever seen any other useful way to denormalize in a production database.

-- 
Kenneth Downs
Use first initial plus last name at last name plus literal "fam.net" to
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