Denormalization and Performance
Understand denormalization as a technique to enhance database read performance by adding redundancy. Learn its benefits and drawbacks, common methods like pre-joining, storing derived values, and summary tables. This lesson helps you balance data integrity and speed for optimized database design in read-heavy environments.
Imagine our OnlineStore is hosting a massive flash sale. Millions of users are browsing product pages simultaneously. For each page view, the database needs to fetch the product’s name, its price, its stock level, and the category it belongs to. In our current, nicely normalized database, this means the system has to quickly join the Products table with the Categories table for every single request. When this happens millions of times a minute, even a simple join can slow the entire website to a crawl, leading to frustrated customers and lost sales. This is where a technique that seems to break the rules we've just learned can actually save the day.
In this lesson, we’ll explore the concept of denormalization. It’s a powerful technique used to optimize database performance, but it comes ...