[wsprague]

I think "don't worry about normality" is a ridiculously bad statement. But perhaps "selectively denormalize when you run out of other optimzations" would be a little more reasonable.

One approach is to make all your denormalizations populated by triggers -- that way to you can still think about the DB in "clean" terms in your code when modifying data, but get your denormalized tables for queries, too.