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> It limits, radically, the percent of engineers you can hire (to those who understand this and are willing to work this way), and it slows deployment radically.

We could also invest in tooling to make this kind of thing easier. Unclear why humans need to hand-normalise the database schema - isn't this exactly the kind of thing compilers are good at?

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Normalization cannot be done by machines, because it depends on expressing the (and only the) predicate that corresponds to the business rule in question.

It requires apprehending the essence of the situation, something a machine cannot do.

Sure it can. Not in a vacuum, maybe, but with some guidance from the user as to dependency relations. Ideally you have enough data baked into your schema to infer those relations.

a fully normalized relation is one where the SQL (say) table in question represents one and only one predicate of your business rules.

It is literally impossible for that to be done automatically. Someone needs to look at the resulting code and confirm that that was the case.

Or they need to write the business rules down, in some sort of expressive format that can be tested against the requirements... Say, an artificial language of some sort. One might call it "programming"

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