What is the problem with highly normalized tables?

Highly normalized tables have several issues:

• Query complexity: Retrieving data often requires performing multiple JOINs between tables, which complicates SQL queries and can reduce performance.

• Performance degradation: Due to the large number of relationships and JOINs, query execution time increases, especially with large volumes of data.

• Maintenance difficulty: The database structure becomes less intuitive, making it harder to understand and maintain the data schema.

• Redundant operations: Frequent access to multiple tables can lead to unnecessary read and write operations.

In the end, while normalization helps eliminate redundancy and update anomalies, excessive normalization can negatively impact performance and ease of data handling. A balance between normalization and denormalization is often used depending on system requirements.