Hans-Jürgen Schönig makes an argument:
The concept of “normalization” is often the first thing people who are new to databases are going to learn. We are talking about one of the fundamental principles in the realm of databases. But what is the use of normalization in the first place? Well, we want to avoid redundancies in the data and make sure that information is stored in a way that helps reduce mistakes and inconsistencies. Ultimately, that is all there is to it: No redundancies, no mistakes, no inconsistencies.
There’s an example in this of “too much normalization” but I’m going to push back because this is a common misunderstanding of the idea of normalization.
The example covers removing price from an invoice table and having people look up the price from the product table, as having each price in an invoice is duplication, and we’re trying to eliminate duplication.
This argument is wrong, because it conflates two concepts. The listing price of an item is its current price. This is the thing you will see on a products table. The sale price of an item on the invoice table is a historical artifact and is not the same as the listing price, even if the dollar amounts match. Hans-Jürgen points out the consequence of making this mistake, and is correct in pointing this out. But it’s not “too much normalization” because it misunderstands the domain model and eliminating sale price from a table would remove information. Properly following the rules of normalization means you cannot lose information–that’s what each one of the normal forms does. In this case, we remove an attribute based on a faulty assumption that there is a functional dependency between product ID and sale price (that is, every time you see a specific product ID, you will always see a specific sale price). That’s the crux of the issue in this example, but the concept of normalization takes strays as a result of the faulty assumed functional dependency.
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