Just wanted to give everyone a heads up on a pretty interesting topic that's happening tomorrow at the Nashville PHP UG.

http://www.nashvillephp.org/events/47757302/

Here is what will be covered:

As operational database schemas become complex, users resort to denormalization to handle performance issues. This includes a range of techniques from materialized views to using MySQL as a key-value store for blobs containing full objects. While denormalization solves immediate bottlenecks, it comes at a hefty price.

In this presentation Ori will explore common denormalization approaches and tradeoffs using real world examples. He will then present a solution under development at Akiban Technologies to alleviate these same problems much more efficiently, and allow users to get the best of both worlds.