Home/ Questions/Q 7907653
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-03T11:33:27+00:00

This is something I have been doing recently and was wondering if others do

  • 0

This is something I have been doing recently and was wondering if others do it too and if so what is the name for this type of practice.

I keep shortcut columns in my tables so I can avoid doing too many joins. For example if I have a users table and a geo table:

Users:

id | username | zip       | copy_latitude | copy_longitude | other info
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1  | Bob      | 11345     | 40.81518000   | -73.04550000   | etc...

Geo:

id | zip_code | latitude    | longitude
----------------------------------------
1  | 11345    | 40.81518000 | -73.04550000

Now if I wanted to get Bob’s latitude and longitude I can do so in the same select statement that I would use to get bob’s other info:

SELECT a_bunch_of_other_columns, copy_latitude, copy_longitude 
FROM users WHERE id = 1;

vs (if I didn’t keep the shortcuts):

SELECT a_bunch_of_other_columns, latitude, longitude 
FROM users
INNER JOIN geo ON user.zip = geo.zip_code
WHERE users.id = 1;

By keeping the shortcuts I saved myself a join. Now this may not seem like a big deal for this example table and statement but I have some huge tables and statements with 6 or 7 joins and I feel like this helps.

The only overhead is having to update both places anytime something changes. I take care of that via stored procedures.

My questions are:

  • is this a common practice among developers and if so what is it called?
  • is my database still normalized if I do this? (I would assume so since I am always keeping a valid copy of the data in the proper
    location even if I don’t use it from there, for the sake of data integrity)
Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It is not normalised anymore as you have duplicated data in your tables.

    I guess you could call it “Denormalised”.

    The only time your would really do it is for speed/optimisation purposes, which is what you are saying in your question, that you have done it to remove complexity.

    Honestly I have never got to the point in any of my databases where I have needed to do this to optimise query speed.

    I would suggest doing a benchmark to see just how much faster it is then a well indexed join

    • 0