What is MySQL denormalization and should you be doing it?

Originally, I was going to write an tutorial over MySQL Performance Tuning Tips & Tricks. I quickly realized that this tutorial would be a bullet list of Tips & Tricks, and thus would be too short and require users to go searching elsewhere for terms they did not understand, or would lose users because it would become far too long. Instead I decided to hash out a series of tutorials to publish individually. While none of these tutorials will build off of each other, some terms you learn in one may be referenced in others.

In this tutorial we will take a look at what Database Denormalization is and how it is different from Normalization. Many DBAs probably use the Normalization rules in designing databases, either because they have never heard of Denormalization or they do not fully understand it.

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