As operational database schemas become complex, users resort to denormalization to handle performance issues. This includes a range of techniques from materialized views to using MySQL as a key-value store for blobs containing full objects.
While denormalization solves immediate bottlenecks, it comes at a hefty price. This presentation explores common denormalization approaches and tradeoffs using real world examples. It presents a solution under development at Akiban Technologies to alleviate these same problems much more efficiently, and allow users to get the best of both worlds.
Event producer: San Francisco MySQL Meetup Group