Normalized Databases = Poor Performance?

In light of Jared's highly informative presention on why we should normalize for performance (Hotsos 2006) I was struck by this statement.

http://www.quest-pipelines.com/newsletter-v7/newsletter_0406.htm

> Materialized views are an Oracle Silver Bullet when pre-joining tables
> together for super-fast response time.
>
> One issue with highly-normalized, non-redundant Oracle table designs (e.g.
> third normal form) is that Oracle experiences a high degree of overhead
> (especially CPU consumption) when joining dozens of tables together,
> over-and-over again.
>
> Using materialized views we pre-join the tables together, resulting in a
> single, fat, wide and highly-redundant table.
>

Not trying to start a flame war or anything here! While there are certainly "truisms" in the statement above, it does seem to me at first glance to be a statement that feeds into the "normalization hurts performance" mindset.

I have not read the entire article yet.

Thanks,
Ethan

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