Although I understand your point, I think you're confusing things by saying that you will get different answers depending on the degree of of normalisation. Str

Although I understand your point, I think you're confusing things by saying that you will get different answers depending on the degree of of normalisation. Strictly speaking, if two databases differ only in their level of normalisation, then they will store the same information, just in different places. When you update the denormalised version, you will have to update the same values in multiple places. If you don't want to update that value everywhere, then what you have isn't denormalisation, it is actually a different data model, which stores different information. Since you wouldn't be able to get to the "normalised" version you describe without losing information, it is probably wrong to call it "denormalised" in the first place.