I often use GROUP BY to create aggregated tables and then join them, mimicking a true Entity-Relationship (ER) model. It cuts query load by reading fewer rows and skips repetitive calculations... brilliant! 😂 Your technical take is fascinating. It’s a completely different angle from mine, yet as Deaf individuals working with databases, our approaches somehow align. Your perspective clicks perfectly... it’s just a different lens. For me, though, I lean on designing a relational database to keep data safe. I translate business rules into constraints, ensuring only clean, transformed data gets inserted. That way, I can pull from messy datasets or legacy sources... like mainframes or old systems with terrible databases... clean it up upfront, and then denormalise. Less scripting means I can focus on tight data transformation, using GROUP BY and similar ops for denormalisation. That’s my way... my Deaf way, too. 🤘😀 Your approach, though, feels all about denormalisation from the start. You’re hammering indexes for performance and I/O efficiency, minimising joins, precomputing data, optimising parallel execution, leveraging memory-optimised tables, tuning buffer pools, refining row versioning and lock escalation... and then digging deep into engine-level analysis. Respect! 🫡 Reading your technical posts hit me like a crash onto a wooden floor... the light bulb in my head just flicked on! Damn… it dawned on me that you, me, and maybe other Deaf folks who’ve wrestled with databases for years, we visualise structures hard. We don’t lean on spoken language or even English context as much. No shade to hearing folks I’ve worked with, but I sometimes get frustrated when they act like they’ve got it all figured out... copy-pasting tasks, skimming books, leaning too hard on English without real hands-on grind. It’s shortcut references that end up needing more manual data integrity checks, even if they get the same result. That bloats costs, tanks productivity, and turns into a honey pot... spawning extra roles (which management loves to justify their big salaries). Worst case, it even cracks the door open for fraud and corruption. I’m thinking of making videos of me and my database work, of course with an interpreter for voice. In fact, one of my network connections, @rob_farley , has been pushing me to do this for a long time. It’s not the work I’m struggling with... it’s the shield over my head. To be honest, I’m in the early stages of breaking that shield... hiding my real work or showcasing it publicly has been tough due to past traumatic workplace experiences that built a wall around me for years. That’s why I don’t post my programming or database design work on this platform or my website, or even release the real web-based applications I’ve built yet... I’m still wrestling with my mental health. But my mind’s getting clearer since I was forced to retire in 2023 to protect myself, and I’m hoping that clarity helps me break through. I think @DataRepublican , a Deaf database professional, is my true inspiration... this helps me big time 😢. Sorry for writing such a long post!