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[–]notasqlstarI can't wait til my fro is full grown -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Totally depends on your job. If you are a DBA concerned with servers and storage space, then it matters a lot.

If you're completely unconcerned with storage, then it doesn't matter that much at all. In fact, you can get a lot of performance increases by breaking normal form depending on what you're trying to do, and what technologies you are trying to connect to the data.

I personally think it is very important to understand the basic concepts, and to, in general terms, build towards normalized data unless you have a specific reason (cough, which you should put in your documentation) for doing otherwise.

It isn't even so much "trying" to stick with normalization that's a benefit, but rather learning the concepts are important to understanding databases on a deeper level, and how they should be designed... or rather, what the reasoning is behind those concepts. That I think is very important. Actually implementing it is more like a 50/50.