RE: over-normalized?

> From: Saira Somani [mailto:saira_somani_at_yahoo.com]
>
>
> Is there such thing as an over-normalized database design?

Sure. But usually that would be in the case of doing olap-type reporting in a transactional app.

> What defines over-normalization? And what are its
> consequences? (Other than the obvious degraded database
> performance and lots of tuning)

What kind of "problems" are folks talking about? 99 times out of ten ;-) it's developers who consider joins "weird".

> I hear rumblings that our ERP system is over-normalized.

Could be; I'm working on a planning app that is just about as normalized as I've ever seen in a database I didn't create ;-). The problem is, of course, that there are a lot of olap-type queries that are needed, and hence we have some of the squirreliest-looking code in our report engine. The OO guys don't care that much about it, as they have a pretty efficient relational-to-Object engine that does all the roll-up stuff for them.

So, what are the kinds of problems you are running into?

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