I really have to take issue with the normalization point. Modern databases have optimizers that operate under the assumption that your schema is normalized. W

I really have to take issue with the normalization point. Modern databases have optimizers that operate under the assumption that your schema is normalized. When you try to get clever and do optimizations yourself, you can very easily trick the optimizer into doing the wrong thing, and actually make things worse. I would argue that de-normalizing is much more of a beginner mistake that over-normalizing.