Certainly there is an important part for normalisation and it should be taught that way. The original blog post however was to draw attention to areas of discrepancy in the "rules". I too was taught at Uni that normalisation was the correct way of doing databases, but when I got into the world of data warehousing, what was taught as "rules" suddenly started to get blurred in how exactly they should be applied.

I know some university courses will cover specific areas such as data warehousing, but they are probably still a bit few and far between I would think. Most of them stick to the "traditional" methods of database design.

Certainly there are situations that databases do not fall under the same rules as for normalised databases, and that is exactly the purpose of this blog entry :)