There is a debate in our company for flat table structure vs normalized table structure.
As of now, we do believe that we have a normalized database and application is working well with it.
But, reporting is done on client side by a IT guy as there are some ad-hoc reports are generated time to time.
Sometimes he is worried as he cannot extract details simply as from a flat table structure.
He has escalated to the management and they are also in an impression that high normalized database is not really useful.
How can we defend the normalized database vs flat table structure for this context. Anyone had this experience before.