Re: Denormalization WAS: Low Performance for big hospital server ..

Frank,

> Now that's rich. I don't think I've ever seen a database perform
> worse after it was normalized. In fact, I can't even think of a
> situation where it could!

Oh, there are some. For example, Primer's issues around his dating
database; it turned out that a fully normalized design resulted in very bad
select performance because of the number of joins involved. Of course, the
method that did perform well was *not* a simple denormalization, either.

The issue with denormalization is, I think, that a lot of developers cut their
teeth on the likes of MS Access, Sybase 2 or Informix 1.0, where a
poor-performing join often didn't complete at all. As a result, they got
into the habit of "preemptive tuning"; that is, doing things "for performance
reasons" when the system was still in the design phase, before they even know
what the performance issues *were*.

Not that this was a good practice even then, but the average software project
allocates grossly inadequate time for testing, so you can see how it became a
bad habit. And most younger DBAs learn their skills on the job from the
older DBAs, so the misinformation gets passed down.

--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco