Once upon a time in a land far, far away (you know, the 90s), there lived the data base admins.
The data base admins, or DBAs as we will call them, lived a normalized life. They lived in the land of DASD, speaking the language of SQL. The cost of real estate in DASD was so high that the poor DBAs were afraid of ever building the same structure twice.
"Normalize!" they would say. But they would never repeat it! They worshiped Codd and the 1NF. They were happy, but, as time went by, they became slow.
Eventually, the DBAs realized that DASD wasn't the only place their data could live. RAM, and distributed file systems appeared, and suddenly, the cost of real estate plummeted, and the top priority went from storage to search & retrieval. This change was brought upon the DBAs by an invasion of "Users" - from the kingdom of "The Web". Transactions were no longer entered by experts using green screens - tolerant of multi-second response times ... now "Retail Shoppers" (GASP!) were entering their own transactions - and they didn't tolerage multi-second transactions ... in fact, they wanted almost instant gratification.
Alas, SQL, with it's selects and joins, no longer was fast enough. Non SQL data bases arose, trading space on DASD for speed in transactions.
Seriously - as the cost of disk has plummeted, the need to spend time, and money on normalizing transactions has become a lower and lower priority. This trend will continue as long as disk prices continue to fall. When a complete transaction takes 1 mb to store un-normalized, and 750k to store when normalized, and with the cost of about $0.01 per gb, it doesn't make economic sense to "break it up".
This trend will continue - as compute costs fall - the need to spend time optimizing algorithms for transactions will fall - leading to a "generic" transaction.
Just my thoughts.
BJG
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