ATWOOoOD!!
(A cry of frustration from a DBA stuck in legacy de-normalised hell)
I love your blog Jeff, but I have to say that when I first read this post my first reaction was one much like the one you yourself had after reading about Wasabi. If this post leads to even one more de-normalised database in the world, is is already evil. Anyway - before I had time to comment, most of what I wanted to say (and more) had already been said (rudely, even).
There is now no real point in adding another voice to the thorch-wielding pitchfork DBA posse knocking on your door, so instead I want to make a suggestion: Eat my shorts. No, wait, sorry, that was frustration again - I want to suggest this:
In the spirit of the ideas behind stackoverflow, and in order to spread knowledge and learn, let us help!
Instead of going dark about this, challenge the community! Make posts with examples where you feel you will run into trouble, and allow people to comment. Let the people who throw the tomatoes here put up or shut up! Hides tomato behind back
For thisandthat purpose in stackoverflow, I need to have A, B, D, (D*X-4) and H from these six tables (ill.), and I need to handle a load of about 4 executions per second. My current plan is to jam everything up into one huge table because then the execution time drops from 345 ms to 87 ms. I need at least y, preferably less. Comments?
I hold (not even weakly) the strong opinion that normalising is not a collective madness, it is not like the religion of the angle brackets, (XML), it is The Right Way™. I am confident that in the lifetime of Stack Overflow you will NEVER encounter a situation where denormalising is the right thing to do.
Let us prove it to you!