SQLRNNR (7/30/2012)

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Michael Valentine Jones (7/30/2012)

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I'm really not sure exactly what you want to discuss.

There are plenty of people that create denormalized databases and claim they did it for speed, and not just in e-Commerce applications.

Usually, the answer is simple: they just didn't know how to create a normalized database, so they claim they did it for performance.

This is far too common. And every time I have seen it, the argument was the same - for performance. Refactoring the database to demonstrate the error of their ways has shown no issues with performance and that they just did not understand good db design.