Aaron Parecki

As soon as people hear about your product, they’ll start forming an opinion about it. You might as well control that opinion and align it with your own goals.

Joins are fast. Joins should be considered standard practice with a properly normalized database schema. Don't fear the join. It's true that join performance degrades non-linearly as the size of the data set increases. Therefore, it doesn't scale as nicely as single table queries, but it still does scale. It's also true that a bird flies faster without any wings, but only straight down.