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by ocharles 5046 days ago
If you never need to query 'inside' the array, then I don't think that's a violation of 1NF at all. If you treat the entire array as an atomic value, then I would think that's still 1NF.
1 comments

Even if you do need to query inside the array, how is this different from something like WHERE x like 'prefix%'? Is that a violation of 1NF too?
Arguably, yes, because you haven't really broken your data down as much as you need to; but this is a fairly contentious issue - just see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_normal_form#Atomicity. If you are frequently needing to query inside data, you may well gain from moving that 'prefix' into a separate column, or more drastically rethinking your data model if that's appropriate.
In this example prefix is something the user typed in. So textcolumn LIKE '%blahblah%'.