Myths About Normalization
It’s hard to find a subject that is so widely misunderstood, despite having a precise definition. You are practically guaranteed to encounter developers who express with complete confidence untruths such as these:
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“Normalization makes a database slower. Denormalization makes a data- base faster.”
False. It’s true that you may need to use a join to retrieve attributes from separate tables after you apply normalization. If you denormalize data, you can avoid some joins. For example, the comma-separated list in Chapter 2, Jaywalking stores products for a given bug. But what if you also need a list of bugs for a given product? Denormalization usually helps convenience or performance for one type of query, but at great ...
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