In database design, sometimes you have a column in one table whose entries are pointers into another table—e.g. maybe I have a Users table, and each User has a primaryAddress field which is a pointer into an Address table. That keeps things relatively compact and often naturally represents things—e.g. if several Users in a family share a primary address, then they can all point to the same Address. The Address only needs to be represented once (so it’s relatively compact), and it can also be changed once for everyone if that’s a thing someone wants to do (e.g. to correct a typo). That data is called “normalized”.
But it’s also inefficient at runtime to need to follow that pointer and fetch data from the second table, so sometimes people will “denormalize” the data—i.e. store the whole address directly in the User table, separately for each user. Leo’s using that as an analogy for a net separately “storing” versions of the “same fact” for many different contexts.
What’s “denormalization”?
In database design, sometimes you have a column in one table whose entries are pointers into another table—e.g. maybe I have a Users table, and each User has a primaryAddress field which is a pointer into an Address table. That keeps things relatively compact and often naturally represents things—e.g. if several Users in a family share a primary address, then they can all point to the same Address. The Address only needs to be represented once (so it’s relatively compact), and it can also be changed once for everyone if that’s a thing someone wants to do (e.g. to correct a typo). That data is called “normalized”.
But it’s also inefficient at runtime to need to follow that pointer and fetch data from the second table, so sometimes people will “denormalize” the data—i.e. store the whole address directly in the User table, separately for each user. Leo’s using that as an analogy for a net separately “storing” versions of the “same fact” for many different contexts.
I meant it as an analogy to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denormalization