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copied!<p>Some more answers to your questions:</p> <p>1) You're pretty much on target for someone who is approaching a problem like this for the first time. I think the pointers from others on this question thus far pretty much cover it. Good job!</p> <p>2 & 3) The performance hit you will take will largely be dependent on having and optimizing the right indexes for your particular queries / procedures and more importantly the volume of records. Unless you are talking about well over a million records in your main tables you seem to be on track to having a sufficiently mainstream design that performance will not be an issue on reasonable hardware. </p> <p>That said, and this relates to your question 3, with the start you have you probably shouldn't really be overly worried about performance or hyper-sensitivity to normalization orthodoxy here. This is a reporting server you are building, not a transaction based application backend, which would have a much different profile with respect to the importance of performance or normalization. A database backing a live signup and scheduling application has to be mindful of queries that take seconds to return data. Not only does a report server function have more tolerance for complex and lengthy queries, but the strategies to improve performance are much different. </p> <p>For example, in a transaction based application environment your performance improvement options might include refactoring your stored procedures and table structures to the nth degree, or developing a caching strategy for small amounts of commonly requested data. In a reporting environment you can certainly do this but you can have an even greater impact on performance by introducing a snapshot mechanism where a scheduled process runs and stores pre-configured reports and your users access the snapshot data with no stress on your db tier on a per request basis.</p> <p>All of this is a long-winded rant to illustrate that what design principles and tricks you employ may differ given the role of the db you're creating. I hope that's helpful.</p>

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