Database Performance: Pay Me Now or Pay Me Later
Many database performance decisions come down to “pay me now or pay me later.” Some decisions will produce faster inserts and updates at the cost of slower and more complex reads, while other decisions will slow down inserts and updates but provide faster and easier reads.
Design decisions related to performance. I tend to go for extreme pay-me-now in some high-traffic scenarios, although a dedicated indexing engine like solr/lucene can help a lot without compromising too much on database design.