Gerry,

>Design the "ideal" on paper; then denormalize, etc. for performance and practicality ...

I like that.


>A distinction can be made between the "production" system and the "information" system.
>
>The "production" system is highly normalized and is used primarily for OLTP (online transaction processing).
>
>The "information" system feeds off the production system, may be denormalized, multi-dimensional and summarized to satisfy data warehouse/data mart needs and is geared towards OLAP (online analytical processing).
>
>Each may use a different DBMS.

That approach is very interesting and might be a good fit. It does seem like a lot of trouble for a situation that is not OLTP (our payroll is batch oriented), and where the transaction volume is not extremely high. If I can get away with keeping the total for the report categories in the transaction record I would prefer that.

Thank you for your input.

Alex