I worked in an org where a lot of records were denormalized to be used in a search database... since I went through that level of work anyway, I also fed the exports into S3 records for a "just in case" backup. That backup path became really useful in practice, since there was a need for eventually a "pending" version of records, separate from the "published" version.

In practice, the records themselves took no less than 30 joins for a flat view of the record data that was needed for a single view of what could/should have been one somewhat denormalied record in practice. In the early 2010's that meant the main database was often kicked over under load, and it took a lot of effort to add in appropriate caching and the search db, that wound up handling most of the load on a smaller server.