The "correct" answer is to fully normalize the design and get away from a mixed bag of columns and nulls. The MESS is bad from every perspective, except query performance. A semi-normalized design that separates the STATE CHANGES from the ESSENTIAL DEFINITION is an optimal design in many respects.
Here are the tabular results that show the cost of fragmentation in size and time.
| fragmented size | fragmented time | |||
| min | max | min | max | |
| Denorm | 1.58 | 2.67 | 1.11 | 1.13 |
| Semi-Norm | 1.63 | 2.13 | 1.49 | 1.56 |
| Norm | 1.73 | 2.23 | 1.46 | 2.04 |