Should databases always be normalized?

I posted a comment on this subject today. My point is not that normalization is not good as a rule, but rather that there are times that you could optimized your design by deviating from the model.

The example seems to be such a case, where you avoid having a table with very many records by storing the data in a list (violates first normal form). More about this later...

You could also take a look at Denormalization.

Moving from MS SQL Server to MySQL

This spring I have added some new modules to our system. The old ones are all based on Microsoft SQL Server, but for the new ones we decided to go with MySQL as a part of a strategy of moving to MySQL with the whole system. We decided to use InnoBase as a storage engine and Hibernate for accessing the database from our Java application. No strange decisions, I believe.

The development phase is now over, with no major problems, and the system is up and running. During this autumn we will see how it works, but I'm nit very worried, it seems stable.

Unfortunately the customers strategy is today unclear, so we're stuck in a situation with two databases. Personally, I feel that using MS SQL Server in a Java environment is a questionable approach, since Microsoft is positioning the product as a part of the .net platform. And the 2000 version, which we are currently running, is getting old...

Enter the blog universe

OK, finally registered for a blog, as I have been thinking about for quite a while. Let's see where this leads to, will I have the energy to keep it up?

And in english (more or less...) too! Why would a swede write in english? Well, mainly because the content will be mostly computer related, where english seems like the natural language. Might be a few more personal entries too, but that is really not the purpose.