Have you encountered problems when normalizing or denormalizing data? How does normalization help with heavy loads on the DBMS?

Denormalization is the deliberate duplication of data in a database to optimize performance, especially under high load on the DBMS.

If you have a database in third normal form (3NF), the data is well-structured, redundancy is minimized, but complex queries with many JOINs can put a high load on the DBMS.

In such cases, denormalization helps:

• Reduce the number of JOINs by keeping frequently used data together.
• Increase read speed by storing aggregated or precomputed data.

However, denormalization increases the complexity of data maintenance, as you need to ensure data consistency during updates.

Example: instead of storing a user's address in a separate table, you can add address fields directly to the users table if you often need to retrieve users with their addresses.

In summary, under heavy DBMS load, denormalization can help speed up reads but requires careful handling of updates and maintaining data integrity.