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
