The traditional approach to database and schema design is based on the fallacy that data must be written in the same form as it will be queried. Debates about normalization and denormalization (see “Many-to-One and Many-to-Many Relationships”) become largely irrelevant if you can translate data from a write-optimized event log to read-optimized application state: it is entirely reasonable to denormalize data in the read-optimized views, as the translation process gives you a mechanism for keeping it consistent with the event log.
