Do I need to normalise?

johnnykilo

I'm creating a database which has items and lists. A list can have many items and an item can be on many lists. In my design I had

a table for items: (item_id, description, quantity)
a table for lists: (list_id, description)
a junction table: (list_id, item_id)

But I'm wondering if having just one table: (list_id, list_description, item_description, quantity)

and having the repeating list_id and list_description would outweigh the creation of two extra tables?

Does anyone have any ideas? This is for a college project, so I'm wondering should I just stick to what we did in college and just create the three normalised tables?

snappieT

You almost certainly want the normalised tables for a college project. Ordinarily, you denormalise only for performance when reading (only need to read from one table), but you want to avoid writing to a denormalised table because of the necessity to update values in multiple locations.