[abalashov]

The difference is in a matter of degree. I agree that denormalisation can be beneficial - even necessary - in certain scenarios, particularly when other design optimisations are exhausted. But that's a far cry from "the normal forms you learned about in school are an utter waste of time that will throw your database performance in the gutter."

[gtuhl]

Agreed it was too strong of a statement, but denormalization really is something you do all the time in big databases. It is not some targeted last resort technique.

If you have 30 million rows in a table you absolutely cannot do joins so you bring everything in that you commonly need.