When normalization hurts more than it helps Guest: Oliwia Brandt
44 min
Braktr Vurdx — Audio Series
Database Design, Discussed Without Shortcuts
Conversations about schema decisions, relational tradeoffs, indexing strategies, and the unglamorous side of data architecture that rarely appears in documentation.
Recent Episodes
New episodes every two weeks
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38 min
Designing for read-heavy vs write-heavy loads Solo episode
29 min
Composite indexes — the full picture Guest: Sigrún Halldórsdóttir
51 min
UUID vs sequential ID — a nuanced look Guest: Rúairí Ó Maolalaidh
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Latest episode
When normalization hurts more than it helps
Third normal form is not a destination — it is a starting point. Oliwia Brandt walks through four production cases where over-normalized schemas created join overhead that could not be solved without architectural changes. The episode focuses on PostgreSQL but the reasoning applies broadly.
Episode 07
What This Series Is Actually About
Most database content online stops at tutorials. This series goes further — into the decisions that happen after you understand the basics, when you are sitting with a schema that works on paper but causes problems in production.
"The index was there. It just was not being used — and nobody knew why until we read the query planner output together."
Each episode is a conversation grounded in real scenarios. Guests come from different industries — SaaS, logistics, fintech — and what connects them is experience with data at scale. The host brings the architecture angle; guests bring the operational reality.
Episodes started in 2020 and have covered topics from partition pruning to soft delete patterns. There is no lesson plan. Questions come from actual problems submitted by listeners and mentorship clients of Braktr Vurdx.
Topics Across the Series
Recurring themes that surface across episodes — approached from different angles each time, never repeated as a formula.
Schema Design
Table structure decisions that are easy to get wrong and difficult to refactor. When to split, when to keep together, and how to model relationships that change over time.
Indexing Strategy
What the query planner actually does with your indexes, why partial and composite indexes are underused, and how to read execution plans without guessing.
Performance Tradeoffs
Latency versus throughput, read versus write optimization, and the decisions that make sense at 10k rows but break at 10 million. Concrete numbers, real engines.
Architectural Patterns
Event sourcing, CQRS, soft deletes, audit tables — patterns that solve specific problems but introduce their own constraints. When they are worth it and when they are not.