Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

Denormalizing a Database

After a database has been normalized to the third form, database designers intentionally backtrack from normalization to improve the performance of the system. This technique of rolling back from normalization is called denormalization. Denormalization allows you to keep redundant data in the system, reducing the number of tables in the schema and reducing the number of joins to retrieve data.

Tip

Duplicate data is more helpful when the data does not change very much, such as in data warehouses. If the data changes often, keeping all “copies” of the data in sync can create significant performance overhead, including long transactions and excessive write operations.