We can configure Flat Catalog for Category & Products from Admin -> Stores -> Configuration -> Catalog -> Catalog -> Storefront Tab.
There are 2 data models in Magento: eav (default) and flat. EAV is a very angile model it allows user to add custom attributes as many is he likes, but the problem is that it stores the data in many tables and in order to get the data your query will have many JOINs which is a bad performance. Flat model takes the attributes you have created with system-created attributes and creates a multicolumn table. So in order to get the data you will have to perform just 1 simple SELECT query to db.