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

I think its best to keep your OLTP type data denormalized to prevent your core data from getting 'polluted'. That will bite you down the road.

If the bottle neck is because of reporting or read-only needs, I personally see no problem have denormalized reporting tables in addition to the normalized 'production' tables; create a process to roll up to whatever level you need to make queries snappy. A simple SP or nightly process that periodically rolls up and denormalizes tables used only in a read-only fashion can often make a huge difference in the users experience.

After all, what good is it to have a theoretically clean, perfectly normalized set of data if no one wants to use your system because it is to slow?