i don't know if you just don't *want* to understand me or what's the problem.

in my first post in this thread i said "if there will be many searches".

*if*. i just said if. and i said, normalization can lead to worse performance. in case you didn't get it, the word 'can' is in italic. that statement is true and in my context it was not useless.

so all i did was pointing out that if the problem is, that the application has many searches, and normalization here would be worse for these searches, then one should consider a search engine to do the searches. i'm not that stupid to suggest to replace a database with a search engine.

i never said "don't normalize because it make things slow" or something like that.

i'm saying all that because i was working on code with a very flat database. it should have been normalized. but the database design was good for the searches, because almost all of the fields would be needed in a search. so what did we do in the end? replace database searches with a search engine. and that was a good decision. because then we were free to normalize without being worried.