[thelist] SQL query help
rudy
r937 at interlog.com
Fri Jan 4 20:38:19 CST 2002
> I hate to get drawn into debates, but the real myth is
> that a fully normalized relational database is the
> only proper construction.
hi joel
there was no debate, and there are plenty of myths when it comes to
normalization (see fabian pascal's article "Denormalization For
Performance" - Et Tu Academia? http://www.firstsql.com/dbdebunk/fp5a.htm)
the myth i was referring to was the common tendency for people to consider
denormalization at the first suspicion of poor performance
as you said yesterday, this is probably not a good move unless you are
dealing with tables of millions of rows and result sets of thousands, and
have exhausted all indexing strategies
> I always design normalized structures initially, and I
> am a very strong proponent of surrogate keys.
rock solid approach
i am amazed that so many people, new to database design, use surrogate keys
so easily -- it must be that surrogate keys are being taught in all the
intro courses, without that specific name, because many people don't know
what a primary key is, or think an autonumber is automatically the primary
key
> Obviously one uses caution before resorting to data
> redundancy
i would go further and suggest using redundancy only as a last resort
rudy
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