Note: in this case it really is a bad idea
Our team inherited the database from another team. We created a view that joins the tables together into the view that we need, and querying that view has never come close to being a bottleneck, so we've never fixed it.
But we wouldn't have designed it that way in the first place, and if there were signs that this was becoming a bottleneck, then we'd fix it. (The application wouldn't need much fixing.)
Cheers,
Ben
I have come to believe that idealism without discipline is a quick road to disaster, while discipline without idealism is pointless. -- Aaron Ward (my brother)