[hot_gril]

Relational DBs often involve duplication for these kinds of use cases. Simple case-insensitive match can be handled with a custom index that's automatically derived from the col data, but there are more advanced cases where you need manually denormalized tables. Or sometimes it makes sense for performance reasons, but you only do this after you notice the normalized way being too slow.

[tstrimple]

Sure. It's not like all folks who lean on relational databases are third normal form zealots. But third normal form zealots exclusively come from a relational database background. Which makes sense.

[hot_gril]

They probably do, but idk, I've never considered 3NF or the preferred type of DBMS as part of someone's personal identity. These are just tools.