What is the resource impact from normalizing a database?

Question

When taking a database from a relatively un-normalized form and normalizing it, what, if any, changes in resource utilization might one expect?

For example,

Answer 1

There's a very simple answer to your question: it depends.

Firstly, I'd re-phrase your question as 'what is the benefit of denormalization', because normalization is the something that should be done as a default (as the result of a pure logical model) and then denormalization can be applied for very specific tables where performance is critical. The main problem of denormalization is that it can complicate data integrity management, but the benefits in some cases outweigh the risks.

My advice for denormalization: do it only when it really hurts and make sure you got all scenarios covered when it comes to maintaining data integrity after any inserts, updates or deleted.