At the time, Nixon was normalizing relations with China. I figured that if he could normalize relations, then so could I.

Ted Codd (1923 2003)

The phrase smaller, faster, cheaper has long been the credo of the builders of computer chips, personal digital assistants (PDAs), quantum computers, and even printers. It is well known to be a difficult task to optimize all three at the same time, and most of the time there are important tradeoffs that need to be addressed. A similar phrase, faster, better, cheaper, was used in NASA, but came into serious question after several critical losses in the past decade, including the infamous Mars Climate Orbiter with its disastrous mix of English and metric units in the same system. In database design we would very much like to optimize performance (fast queries), maintainability (fast updates), and integrity (avoiding unwanted deletes) if we can, but the reality is that there are often serious tradeoffs in these objectives that need to be addressed.

First it is important to distinguish the difference between normalization and denor-malization. Normalization is the process of breaking up a table into smaller tables to eliminate unwanted side effects of deletion of certain critical rows and to reduce the inefficiencies of updating redundant data often found in large universal tables. Sometimes, however, normalization is taken too far and some queries become extremely inefficient due to the extra joins required for the smaller tables. Denormalization is the process of adding columns to some tables to...