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When You Shouldn't Normalize your SQL Database

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Database normalization is a formal process of designing your database to eliminate redundant data, utilize space efficiently and reduce update errors. Anyone who has ever taken a database class has it drummed into their heads that a normalized database is the only way to go. This is true for the most part . However there are certain scenarios where the benefits of database normalization are outweighed by its costs. Two of these scenarios are described below.

Immutable Data and Append-Only Scenarios

Pat Helland, an enterprise architect at Microsoft who just rejoined the company after a two year stint at Amazon, has a blog post entitled Normalization is for Sissies where he presents his slides from an internal Microsoft gathering on database topics. In his presentation, Pat argues that database normalization is unnecessary in situations where we are storing immutable data such as financial transactions or a particular day's price list.

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