[development] D7 side effect

[Michael Prasuhn]

On Dec 7, 2010, at 8:07 AM, nan wich wrote:
> Sam, I have a tendency to agree with you on the number of tables. I've kind of gotten used to it, but I sued to look at the database and say, "OMG, 125 tables?" That's one of the drawbacks to normalizing. The idea is that it allegedly ends up decreasing the count, I find that, in practice, it usually does not. In the olden days, before databases (now called NoSql), one could create a file with many different record layouts in it and still understand what one was working with. Just think of it as DBA job security.


I'm pretty sure you have the concept of normalization and de-normalization backwards. There are only a few Drupal modules that I know of that focus on de-normalization, such as http://drupal.org/project/tracker2 and http://drupal.org/project/materialized_view. Otherwise, normalization almost always causes and increase in the number of tables. 

For more info on normalization and it's different forms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_normal_form
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denormalization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialized_view

-Mike
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