Denormalize for Simplicity: Ungood idea?
- by yar
After reading this question, I've learned that denormalization is not a solution for simplicity. What about this case?
I have news-articles which have a list of sites-article-will-be-published-to. The latter can be expressed in normalized fashion either by table and a many-to-many relationship (via a cross-table, I think). But the simple solution is to just throw a bunch of booleans for the sites-article-will-be-published-to. Assuming the sites are:
small in number
will not change over time
have no fields themselves, except a name
Is this still a terrible idea? The many-to-many relationship seems somewhat cumbersome, but I've done it before in cases like this (and it seemed cumbersome).
Note: I'm doing this in Rails, where it's not that painful.
