[strken]

If your catchphrase is Don't Repeat Yourself and some people take it to mean they shouldn't repeat themselves, the fault is entirely with the catchphrase you used.

If a third set of people then take it upon themselves to tell everyone that Actually You Should Repeat Yourself Sometimes, this is not them attacking a strawman, it's an attempt to clear up the confusion caused by the phrase/acronym DRY.

The original definition of DRY was "Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system." That's not what Don't Repeat Yourself means, if read literally. Because DRY sounds like it applies to code instead of to knowledge, of course it's widely misinterpreted! If they'd called it the Fight Unnecessary Copying of Knowledge principle nobody would be having this argument and we'd all get to save ourselves a lot of time.

[Falkon1313]

Yeah, that's a good one. I have found, however, that denormalized tables designed for the queries that you need to do can make a massive impact on performance, especially at scale.

However, it's also a massive pain in the Automated System Structure to keep them updated properly.