Comments on: The Web Is Not A Normalized Relational Database

By: AjiNIMC

AjiNIMC — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 11:41:48 +0000

On web speed means money http://www.idealwebtools.com/blog/downloading-speed/ and if denormalization (in some cases) can offer speed to visitors but a little pain for developers, it is worth. There is big gain in this small pain.

By: Bob Devine

Bob Devine — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 00:40:04 +0000

As Artem wrote, you don’t mean call the web “denormalized” because that implies there is a normalized version. Nope, the web is unstructured.

In addition to the duplication of data, the web also “suffers” from conflicts, errors, and time-varying information. Sorta the opposite of “intelligent design”; the web is a mish-mash of documents slung together without rhyme or reason.

For example, you would think that common facts could be clearly represented. But try to find the exact spelling, to pick a frequent search term, for Britney Spears. Do you mean “Brittany Speers” or many “Britainy Speirs”. Or you get the idea.

One thing that most users of the web are not yet noticing is that there is a lot of old information. While the web is only a decade old, it has junk in it from the first day. How will the web look in another decade when you do a search for “best restaurant chicago” and find a list that is completely out of date?

Bob Devine

By: Duncan Pauly

Duncan Pauly — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 12:12:53 +0000

Apologies: In my previous comment, the penultimate line should have read “If we ever try to NORMALISE the Web, we will be in trouble”. Doh!

By: Duncan Pauly

Duncan Pauly — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 17:17:57 +0000

As you mention, de-normalisation is tactic used to improve performance (for queries) and it works very well in distributed environments. But de-normalisation is treated with caution in relational environments because of the performance and integrity implications when the data is changing. However, with widely distributed immutable data (data that does not change once it has been created), de-normalisation is the optimal solution

By: Glenn Crownover

Glenn Crownover — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 17:14:38 +0000

Interesting food (pizza?) for thoughts! One of the goals of normalization, is to remove redundancies in the data. If you are storing the same information in several places, normalization of the data will centralize the data and reference it from those varied locations.

One trend we are seeing on the web is the offering of APIs for information access. This means that information is being made available (and often updatable) by everyone and from everywhere. This is really a form of normalization, in the sense that the “master copy” of the data remains on the server that offers the API.

If a service like Google Base helps to index a database and make it searchable by the world, it is acting more like a “cache” than a non-normalized database. Meaning, the original DB is still the “master copy” and updates to it will eventually “perculate” down into the Google Base, which simply provides faster, easier access to this data.

By: Derald Muniz

Derald Muniz — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 03:13:38 +0000

A related article regarding the web and databases. Check out this article in InfoWorld dated 11/28/05 by Jon Udell: http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/11/23/48OPstrategic_1.html

By: Ho John Lee's Weblog

Ho John Lee's Weblog — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 00:45:04 +0000

Building better personalized search, filtering spam blogs

Batelle’s Searchblog mentions an article by Raul Valdes-Perez of Vivisimo citing 5 reasons why search personalization won’t work very well. Paraphrasing his list:

Individual users interests / search intent changes over time
The click a…

By: Eric Laughlin

Eric Laughlin — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 00:12:15 +0000

Great blog! I would say that the web is full of normalized databases such as Amazon.com (yes, parts are denormalized but it is largely normalized) however you get to those normalized databases via a search in a denormalized database (Google). But who’s to say what is normalized vs denomalized? Are you modeling a web page or the elements on the web page?

By: Ho John Lee's W

Ho John Lee's W — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 17:45:04 +0000

Building better personalized search, filtering spam blogs

Batelle’s Searchblog mentions an article by Raul Valdes-Perez of Vivisimo citing 5 reasons why search personalization won’t work very well. Paraphrasing his list:

Individual users interests / search intent changes over time
The click a…

By: Murli

Murli — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 05:36:24 +0000

Interesting stuff. Posted about this on my blog and sent you a TrackBack but it doesn't seem to have worked. Appreciate your comments. http://www.murli.net/greekcomplexity/2005/11/denormalisation.html