Once again, a fairly off-topic post. Please ignore if this offends.

I working on a redesign of a Web site that was put together rather haphazardly. The old site worked primarily because the person who wrote it knew the database quirks and could code around them (usually). I'm trying to streamline everything, use Template Toolkit, create a nice, OO interface to the database -- and am repeatedly running into my DBA who claims that I'm being too strict regarding normalization.

Example: we have a products tables with 270 products. These products fall into about 10 categories and these categories have been repeated in the products table rather than moved into their own table. This issue is common throughout the database. The DBA claims that the tables are so small that it's not a serious issue and that by not normalizing the database, we can eliminate an extra join and gain some performance.

Huh?

The "performance gain" is lost as my Perl code has "be aware of" these issues (yes, we have several instances of this). If I'm going to update anything, I've need to make sure that I don't "add" a category by misspelling it, for example. Furthermore, one article states:

As with many formal rules and specifications, real world scenarios do not always allow for perfect compliance. In general, normalization requires additional tables and some customers find this cumbersome. If you decide to violate one of the first three rules of normalization, make sure that your application anticipates any problems that could occur, such as redundant data and inconsistent dependencies.

Unfortunately, it doesn't state under what circumstances one might realistically decide not to normalize. Am I following the rules too blindly? In one instance, the DBA stated that the continents can be in the country table because the continents are never going to change. We've argued these issues repeatedly, but I need to step back and get second opinions. This is for a very important client, but it's a fairly small database.

Cheers,
Ovid

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In reply to Database Design Issues - OT by Ovid

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