I was Jeff Atwood-ed or Coding Horror-er-ed!

Jeff Atwood linked to an older piece of mine, on some of the lessons we learned, scaling Cofax at Philly.com, to illustrate that database normalization shouldn’t be a religion.

For the record, as I mentioned in my post, we created a set of denormalized tables, however, I should have talked some more about how we kept the original normalized tables. We kept them as our ‘one source of truth’ and took the I/O hit on updates to refresh the flattened tables to optimize database reads. We did this as Dare Obasanjo suggests – as an absolute last resort after optimizing indexes and queries first.

As mentioned at High Scalability and at Joe Gregorio’s, the conversation ‘angered the RDBMS True Believers’.

Jeff’s post was a good one because it challenged orthodoxy, stirred the pot, and brought forth good conversation.

Thanks to Coding Horror for the link. I’m honored.