> Reduced column bloat, easy reusability, easy reporting and data extraction, ease of bulk transformation (especially stream processing) Respectfully disagree.

> Reduced column bloat, easy reusability, easy reporting and data extraction, ease of bulk transformation (especially stream processing) Respectfully disagree. For one, reporting is easier when you don't have to JOIN more tables, not harder. Same for data extraction. And how can bulk transformation be harder just because a column is where it would intuitively reside and not in another table who knows where? > I have to reject outright the suggestion that joins are unnatural in a relational database. I'm afraid you misunderstood. It's unnatural to me, the developer, not to the database, to spread closely related columns across different tables. And "tables that grow indefinetely" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for those arguments. Most tables don't grow indefinitely. Like I said, smells like premature optimization. I optimize for humans first.