Handling large databases

Question

I have been working in a web project(asp.net) for around six months. The final product is about to go live. The project uses SQL Server as the database. We have done performance

Answer 1

As the old saying goes "normalize till it hurts, denormalise till it works".

I love this one! This is typically the kind of thing that must not be accepted anymore. I can imagine that, back at DBASEIII times, where you could not open more than 4 tables at a time (unless changing some of your AUTOEXEC.BAT parameters AND rebooting your computer, ahah! ...), there was some interest in denormalisation.

But nowadays I see this solution similar to a gardener waiting for a tsunami to water his lawn. Please use the available watering can (SQL profiler).

And don't forget that each time you denormalize part of your database, your capacity to further adapt it decreases, as risks of bugs in code increases, making the whole system less and less sustainable.