The Pragmatist's Guide To 3NF.

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you ask a database professor to explain Third Normal Form (3NF), he will give you a quote from 1971: “Every non-key attribute must provide a fact about the key, the whole key, and nothing but the key, so help me Codd”

I just nodded profoundly at this absolute gibberish, hoping my face said: ‘Ah yes, the architecture’ instead of ‘Please don’t ask me a follow-up question’. But in real world of data engineering, that cryptic definition boils down to one very simple rule: Fire the Middleman.

The Hidden Compute Taxes in Python's Pathlib

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When combining base paths with relative directories in data ingestion pipelines, pathlib is the go-to standard for readability. But building these paths inside a massive loop quietly eats your CPU.

The Telemetry
#

Here is the telemetry from a 10-million iteration stress test comparing the three ways we, engineers, write path joins.

The Chained String (The Baseline)

# Creates 4 temporary objects per iteration via operator overloading
 return ds_root / "data" / "files" / "silver" / "tables"

Time: 31.0196 seconds

Blog on Kterla

The Pragmatist's Guide To 3NF.

The Hidden Compute Taxes in Python's Pathlib

The Telemetry #

The Telemetry
#