I do think the idea is pretty neat, although it’s pretty close to returning structured data like json.

But I do get a bit of feeling they are trying to solve a trivial problem, at least in their use case. Ultimately there are only so many lecturers, and so many man lectures at a given time. The total data amount wouldn’t be so much, and you can easily group by and sort on client side to achieve the original table which is show on a per lecturer basis. A little redundancy is in my opinion preferred over a query that returns 3 tables that then needs additional complicated work. I also find arguments about overlapping names to not be something the database should be handling, it falls on the data owners/manager instead. Academia is a wild west at times, but either this table is presentation only or a link to lecturer or lecture. And in the latter case, you’ll already throw in the ids so they can be used in an URL to some other site.

While this can have significant less bandwidth, it also risks falling as soon as more data is introduced, as you’re putting the large join operations on the client when you can get free optimizations from the SQL engine you use. I know not having duplicate data could be a thing for something where I work, where essentially we have hourly breakdowns but fetch at least the entire day for a single set of parameters. So that means 24x data for a surprisingly high amount of columns. When we only need 2 of them on the hourly level! But in this case, the data doesn’t strictly need many joins as it has a lot of the information itself, along with there being too much data to join on the client side anyways for this to feel ideal. I feel you’ll increase the complexity a bit too much as well. A big advantage of sql is how easy it is to understand what you are getting.

Its somewhat of a solved problem, if the performance becomes a problem, since we can return nested data anyways. So we can already today technically return a row where the hour and value columns have arrays. We just haven’t done it because it is not a big enough problem.