We are storing the metadata of the content in the database tables. Out which there is a column named keywords which contains the keywords related to the content. So, should we normalise the table based on the keyword column because the keyword column will be holding multiple values.
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A:
I think the answer to the question is very complicated. All the big books about database design says that normalization is a good thing. But in your case it depends on how you are going to query the data. For example if you need to get all the rows that contains a key word you will have to use the like operator which is not very fast. But if you have all the key words in a table then you have only a where which is much faster.
IordanTanev
2010-02-03 09:38:08
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A:
I don't think the answer to this question is complicated at all. This is a textbook normalization problem and the answer is yes, you should definitely normalize this.
Storing multiple values in one column is a violation of first-normal form (most designers try to get to third-normal). The only reason you would want to do this is as a performance optimization, i.e. if the database is extremely large and you are able to use some special indexing strategy on the denormalized column to pull off some specific optimization (i.e. a materialized path). That is not the case here.
Not normalizing will make it difficult to write queries and impossible to index properly. And if you are storing keywords, I can only assume that the reason is for a keyword search - so you definitely want to be able to index this data and write simple queries.
Please - normalize your data.
Aaronaught
2010-02-03 14:57:06
Yes, the important part is if you want to do a keyword search quickly you need an index on the keywords and having them in a normalized column is the easiest way to do this.
Marc
2010-02-03 15:06:03