[OJFord]

There was me assuming it was about normal form, you know, what everyone else means when they talk about 'normalising' in a database context...

Which even more confusingly almost applies but the opposite way around:

> create denormalized analytics datasets on top of them

A common pattern is to have source data 'warehoused' or whatever you want to call it, and then build your, er, normalised schema on top of that.

[factormeta]

One of main reason to normalize data is aim to eliminate duplication, and find "the source data" by properly designing the relationships of tables.

[OJFord]

By source data I meant as originally supplied, that's perhaps not normal and which you have no control over.