ConfPad

As developers we are often encouraged to store data in a normalized fashion. This improves the integrity of data and reduces data redundancy but sometimes makes read queries complex. We will explore how a denormalized data store can be used to improve the performance and developer experience of reports, listing pages and search systems. Specifically thinking about Eloquent we will see that it is possible to maintain a normalized store to ensure integrity while also automatically producing denormalized tables more suitable for running reports. The session will go through data normalization and why it is useful; the problems normalization introduces for reporting; how denormalization solves some of those problems; how we've used denormalization at Vice; strategies for automatically denormalizing your data with Eloquent; and how this could be further applied to populating search indexes.