alt Hacker NewsFair, but one of the big benefits of normalization was the benefit on storage and memory back in the day which was tiny comparatively.
There's always a reason for a dev to ship something shitty but when you show you can use 80% less storage for the same operation you can make the accountants your lever.
Replies
jklowden • yesterday at 2:00 PM
Nonsense. See Codd’s first paper.
1NF removes repeating groups, putting for example data for each month in its own row, not an array of 12 months in 1 row.
Storage efficiency was never the point. IMS had that locked down. Succinctness of expression and accuracy of results was the point. And is: normalization prevents anomalous results.
➕ show 3 replies
The purpose of normalization is not to save storage. In fact it might often require more storage, since it involves introducing a foreign-key column. It really depends on the data in question whether it saves storage or require more.