My simplified and contrived example is the following:-
Lets say that I want to measure and store the temperature (and other values) of all the worlds\' towns on a daily
Another alternative could be to go for one table for all data and have a view for the current temperature. This will not help performance but could well aid readability/maintainability. You could even go for an indexed view to improve performance if you have the appropriate version of sql .
If you store all in one table how are you going to make a relational database.
Example:
id--------------GUID----PK
record_id-------GUID
every time a new record will be inserted the [id] will change but [record_id] will remain same. Now if you have to link it with address table how are you going to do that?