sure, from the perspective of the final user it doesn't matter much at all. with my point about normalization being easier to understand I meant to say that it

sure, from the perspective of the final user it doesn't matter much at all. with my point about normalization being easier to understand I meant to say that it is easier for a developer learning about the schema. if I recall ok, I think there's also something about data de-duplication in a normalized database. without this normalization, you could get a lot of repetition, which would actually require to update the same data in multiple places or find some other way to deal with different data about the same entity (some sort of de-synchronization is more likely without normalized schemas). in any case, I'll grant you that normalization should never be 'the' goal for a database.