Topic awaiting preservation: Data Redundancy

I'm currently in the planning stages of a full rebuild of my old site, Mini Portal. I will be building all of the old features of the site (galleries, map guestbook, user pages, etc.. into the site, but this time instead of using phpBB, I'll be building my own simple forum system.

Usually, I make every attempt to get my DB's to third normal form, but looking at the forum layout, I'm having some thoughts on data redundancy. For example, rather than counting the number of posts in a topic each time someone visits the site, why not keep a post_count field in the topic table that is updated only when someone adds a post to a topic? I suppose its not *really* redundant data so much as it is a handy reference that will lower the number of db queries per page viewing. There are a number of fields like this that could be added to my db structure.

when i started writing this post, I was questioning these seemingly redundant fields, but as I worked it out and typed it, I realized that they are not really redundant, and probably a good idea, and the db structure will not suffer from this practice.

Are there any other little tricks that might help the efficiency of such a site?

They are redunant data, very much so.

Don't optimize permaturly. Just keep a layer of indirection, so that you can change it around later if you determine your sytem to be to slow.

so long,

->Tyberius Prime