Does normalization really hurt performance in high traffic sites?
- by Luke101
I am designing a database and I would like to normalize the database. I one query I will joining about 30-40 tables. Will this hurt the website performance if it ever becomes extremely popular? This will be the main query and it will be getting called 50% of the time. The other queries I will be joining about 2 tables.
I have a choice right now to normalize or not to normalize but if the normalization becomes a problem in the future i may have to rewrite 40% of the software and it may take me a long time. Does normalization really hurt in this case? Should I denormalize now while I have the time?