I would say the same thing as well.

The problem with the non-normalized design of Model 1 is that the meaning of the data depends on your one application. Any other application that ever needs to access the database would have to recreate the routines in your application to derive meaning from the stored values.

That goes for not just SELECT statement, but what happens in the first model when a dictionary word is deleted? You are likely to have a lot of orphaned aliases. You would have to manually delete all related entries, or ensure that id number was never used again, even though it would now be free and unique. Not just your app, but for every other application that needed to work with this information ever. It's likely data will be corrupted over time.

When a database is properly modelled, the meaning, context, integrity, etc, is inherent in the data itself. It can be trusted to be right.

In reply to Re^2: OT: benefits of database normalization by keath
in thread OT: benefits of database normalization by revdiablo

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.