title: Is precalculation denormalization? If not, what is (in simple terms)?
body: <p>I'm attempting to understand denormalization in databases, but almost all the articles google has spat out are aimed at advanced DB administrators. I fair amount of knowledge about MySQL and MSSQL, but I can't really grasp this.</p>
  
  <p>The only example I can think of when speed was an issue was when doing calculations on about 2,500,000 rows in two tables at a place I used to intern at. As you can guess, calculating that much on demand took forever and froze the dev server I was on for a few minutes. So right before I left my supervisor wanted me to write a calculation table that would hold all the precalculated values, and would be updated about every hour or so (this was an internal site that wasn't used often). However I never got to finish it because I left</p>
  
  <p>Would this be an example of denormalization? If so, is this a good example of it or does it go much farther? If not, then what is it in simple terms?</p>