There is a time and a place for a denormalized schema. If you are trying to search a large data-set a denormalized schema in a single table with some good index

There is a time and a place for a denormalized schema. If you are trying to search a large data-set a denormalized schema in a single table with some good indexing is much preferable to joining across 30 tables. Whether you choose normalized or denormalized depends very much on a) what you need to do now b) what you may need to do in the future. Both are considerations.