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0 pointssainez2y ago0 comments

> what this might mean in practice is that you do mockups of all of the expected pages and what data is necessary on each one. then you design a schema that results in you never having to do joins on the majority, if not all, of them.

Great suggestion! I had a role where I helped a small team develop a full stack, data-heavy application. I felt pretty good about the individual layers but I felt we could have done a better job at achieving cohesion in the big picture. Do you have any resources where people think about these sorts of things deeply?

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walterbell2y ago

2001, "Denormalization effects on performance of RDBMS", by G. L. Sanders and Seungkyoon Shin, https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Denormalization-effect...

> We have suggested using denormalization as an intermediate step between logical and physical modeling, to be used as an analytic procedure for the design of the applications requirements criteria ... The guidelines and methodology presented are sufficiently general, and they can be applicable to most databases ... denormalization can enhance query performance when it is deployed with a complete understanding of application requirements.

PDF: https://web.archive.org/web/20171201030308/https://pdfs.sema...

endisneigh2y ago

yeah, exactly. in my experience the vast majority of access patterns are designed around a normalized schema, where it really should be that the schema is designed around the access patterns and generously "denormalize" (which doesn't make sense in this context of a new database) as necessary.

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