Note: I am re-publishing some of the articles and reader exchanges from the old DBDebunk (2000-06). How well do they hold up -- have industry knowledge and practice progressed? Judge for yourself and appreciate the difference between a sound foundation and the fad-driven cookbook approach.
January 2, 2001
"... one of the "4 great lies" is "I denormalize for performance." You state that normalization is a logical concept and, since performance is a physical concept, denormalization for performance reasons is impossible (i.e., it doesn't make sense). What term would you use to describe changing the physical database design to be different from the logical design to enhance performance? Because normalization is a logical concept, you imply that this is not called denormalization."
