Home/ Questions/Q 7819047
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-02T06:46:52+00:00

I was taking a look at some important forums such as SMF Forums, PhpBB,

  • 0

I was taking a look at some important forums such as SMF Forums, PhpBB, or VBulleting ones and i realized they are not in 3rd FN.

They have many NULL fiels, for example, in an SMF forum a member row can have all of this columns to NULL:

pm_ignore_list, messageLabels, personalText, websiteTitle, websiteUrl, location, ICQ, AIM, YIM, MSN, timeFormat, userTitle, notifyAnnouncements, secretQuestion, secretAnswer, validation_code, additionalGroups, smileySet

So… lets say 18 fields which can be NULL in any ROW of the table.
That’s not 3rd NF…

Why they do it? I am sure they know much about BD…
Thanks.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The number one reason for denormalization is performance, which is a notorious problem with many discussion forums.

    Originally SQL was not designed to store hierarchical data easily, and there are many less-than optimal schema designs trying to work around this limitation.

    • 0