I de-normalized my database, since the application was crawling otherwise, and Im storing a list of categories for each item in the DB as a raw html version, and simply echoing it out in my design. Each category is actually a link, which is include a tag. Naturally, this is abit of a pain, especially if I want to change the look of how the category links are displayed, since I gotta update all the old cached entries.
What if I were to store this data as a serialized array instead, and simply unserialize it, and then apply formatting to it in php. Would there be a significant performance decrease over simply echoing out the raw html?
It's a bad idea to store values serialized only for a specific language in a database.
Did you consider memcache to reduce "crawls" of your database? I usually find caching to be a much more elegant and flexible solution than a de-normaliezd database.