You Might Have a Performance Bottleneck If...

Abstract

Many a flame war has started over the argued performance of a web application based solely on the language with which it was programmed. You may hear “X scales better than Y,” or “No real programmer uses Z.” More often than not, poor performance in a web application can be traced to data management. The application could be performing tasks better suited to the database, or the database could be poorly designed. Taking a cue from Jeff Foxworthy’s “You might be a redneck i...” jokes, this article will introduce terms and concepts related to data normalization and application optimization in order to help you pinpoint poor database structures, data-storage processes, and data-retrieval techniques.