"Which leads to another bad experience: the pernicious use of foreign keys. In the ORMs I've used, links between classes are represented in the data model as foreign keys which, if not configured carefully, result in a large number of joins when retrieving the object. (A recent count of one such table in my work resulted in over 600 attributes and 14 joins to access a single object, using the preferred query methodology.)
...When you have foreign keys, you refer to related identities with an identifier. In your application, "identifier" takes on various meanings, but usually it's the memory location (a pointer). In the database, it's the state of the object itself. These two things don't really get along because you can really only use database identifiers in the database (the ultimate destination of the data you're working with)." --wozniak.ca

"The principle of orthogonal design (abbreviated POOD) ... is the second of the two principles of database design, which seek to prevent databases from being too complicated or redundant, the first principle being the principle of full normalization (POFN). Simply put, it says that no two relations in a relational database should be defined in such a way that they can represent the same facts. As with database normalization, POOD serves to eliminate uncontrolled storage redundancy and expressive ambiguity, especially useful for applying updates to virtual relations (views). Although simple in concept, POOD is frequently misunderstood ... is a restatement of the requirement that a database is a minimum cover set of the relational algebra. The relational algebra allows data duplication in the relations that are the elements of the algebra. One of the efficiency requirements of a database is that there be no data duplication. This requirement is met by the minimum cover set of the relational algebra." --Wikipedia.org

"Data sense-making does not benefit from the relational data model. Dr. Codd’s rules for relational modeling were designed to improve efficiencies in data processing and storage, not to make data more intelligible. In fact, structuring data relationally makes the work of data sensemaking more difficult, which is why Dr. Kimball created dimensional data modeling and also why an entire industry of middleware products emerged to hide the complexities of relational models." --Stephen Few, PerceptualEdge.com

• Postgres, the Good Parts: Arrays
• My favorite normalization case study

Q: "Can you have 2 tables, VIEWS and DOWNLOADS, with identical structure in a good DB schema (item_id, user_id, time). Some of the records will be identical but their meaning will be different depending on which table they are in. The "views" table is updated any time a user views an item for the first time. The "downloads" table is updated any time a user downloads an item for the first time. Both of the tables can exist without the other."

A1:"I don't think that there is a problem, per se. From a E/R modeling point of view I don't see a problem with that, as long as they represent two semantically different entities."

A2:"Are you saying that both tables have an 'item_id' Primary Key? In this case, the fields have the same name, but do not have the same meaning. One is a 'view_id', and the other one is a 'download_id'. You should rename your fields consequently to avoid this kind of misunderstanding."

A3: "Chris Date and Dave McGoveran formalised the Principle of Orthogonal Design. Roughly speaking it means that in database design you should avoid the possibility of allowing the same tuple in two different relvars. The aim being to avoid certain types of redundancy and ambiguity that could result."

A4: "When designing a DB there are lots of different parameters, and some (e.g.: performance) may take precedence. Case in point: even if the structures (and I suppose indexing) are identical, maybe "views" has more records and will be accessed more often. This alone could be a good reason not to burden it with records from the downloads." --StackOverflow.com