"the scalability problems being described in your post, and in his presentation, could easily be rectified through the use of indexes and stored procedures." N

"the scalability problems being described in your post, and in his presentation, could easily be rectified through the use of indexes and stored procedures." Not all scalability problems can be solved by throwing indexes and stored procedures around. A improperly designed schema just for the sake of normalizing everything can cost a lot in terms of performance. On the other hand keeping 13 copies of the same data around sounds scary.