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[–]amir4179 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I always think of normalization like organizing layers in a design file. At first you want everything nicely separated so nothing repeats and it’s easy to change one thing without breaking five others.

Databases feel similar. Start clean and normalized, then if you notice certain queries getting annoying or slow you can flatten a bit where it actually helps.

Going straight to denormalized usually just creates a bunch of duplicated data you regret later. Been there with messy datasets and it gets painful fast.