Re: Table Relationships

On Fri, May 30, 2003 at 11:20:33AM -0600, scott.marlowe wrote:

> but denormalizing for storage is usually a bad idea, as it allows your
> data to get filled with inconsistencies.

Sure, but if performance is an important goal for certain kinds of
SELECTs, using a trigger at insert or update to do denormalising is
perhaps an acceptable approach. It's obvious that in most cases,
denormalising instead of optimising your normalisation is silly. But
if you need something to return in, say, 2ms most of the time, and it
requires a wide variety of data, denormalising is a good idea.

It is, of course, contrary to the RDBMS-y mind to denormalise. But
there are (rare) times when it's a good idea, and I hate to see it
rejected out of hand in such cases.

A
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