Breaking The Relational Model

The rule: Normalize until it hurts; denormalize until it works. That’s what you typically get taught early on. While normalizing a database is a solid practice and something you should do when designing a system; it can jump up and bite you when you get under load. You probably won’t deal with most of these issues early on in a system (and shouldn’t), but the time will come where eventually some degree of denormalization is necessary to keep performance up to snuff.