Oracle Database 11gR2 Performance Tuning Cookbook

Optimizing performance with schema denormalization

In this recipe, we will see how schema denormalization can help improve database performance, and what should be done before executing this operation.

Getting ready

We will implement a database schema representing a group of friends and their phone numbers. The following are the requirements for the database:

• For each friend, we want to store the name, surname, and gender
• Each friend may have multiple phone numbers
• For each phone number, we want to know its type of usage (home, work, mobile, and so on)
• A phone number can be shared by more than one friend, for example, Mrs. and Mr. Smith will share the same home number—at least until they get divorced
• For each phone number we want to store, we need to ...