When is Database Muscle Too Much?

DBOrNotDB asks: "At some of the places I've worked in the past, there have been DBAs who generally insisted that given accurate specifications and enough hardware and software, you could stuff nearly anything you wanted to into a database, manipulate it, and pull it back out again in a reasonable time. The feeling at my current workplace seems to be that very few projects lend themselves to database usage and that a customized one-off data storage solution should be developed for each project. This seems like a violation of many major software engineering principals (e.g. reuse) to me. My question is, what kind of success or horror stories does the community have about trying put different projects into databases? Numbers (# of rows, tables, total data storage, cost, etc) would be nice, but even just anecdotes would be helpful."

Comments

Re:afaik...

[Rick the Red]

But please, for the love of God, don't listen to those "real world experience" morons who say denormalization is key. That's all well and good until you've got the same information replicated to hell and gone and records start to disagree: Is the billing address 123 North Main or 1313 Mockingbird Lane? Half the invoices for this customer show one, half the other.

If your normalized tables take a performance hit, buy a bigger box. If you munge the data with replication, you're screwed.