[e12e]

Maybe the joins are faster? It's really hard to tell without more context/detail.

I think many were burned by mysql back in the day - trying to use sql as a document database - or using php frameworks that happily did a hundred queries pr page view.

As a general rule of thumb, for a REST app - I'd say the db should be normalized, and the cache layer(s) can handle the denormalization.

Ie when you get /page=1 varnish can spit out a response from ram (which if you squint, is a denormalized projection of your data), or it can go talk to your app, that talks to the db. And the latter is most likely fast enough (tm).