Thimble view of a long story....
Ten years ago I was designing reports for an 'improved' version of a proprietary app. The developers said they were using 'sixth and seventh level normalization'.  After a lot of searching I found one other system that was using this same system, the Royal Mail Service in the UK.
The person I talked with had retired from there a couple years before. He described it as the 'worst bloody system ever'.  
The system I was working on had to be abandoned ( 2 yrs + $4M US ) because the database could only deliver meaningful data in columns and our customers wanted data in rows.