What Is "normalization"? "denormalization"? Why Do You Sometimes Want To Denormalize?
Answer»
Normalizing data MEANS eliminating REDUNDANT information from a table and organizing the data so that FUTURE changes to the table are EASIER.
Denormalization means allowing redundancy in a table. The main benefit of denormalization is improved performance with simplified data retrieval and MANIPULATION. This is done by reduction in the number of joins needed for data processing.