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Bah. That's nothing. (Score:1)
A field called MfgPartNumber. What do you think is in that field? Well, sometimes, a mfgs part number for a part. Sometimes a prefix. Sometimes empty, but on private label parts only. Sometimes, a brand number.
Sigh.
Re: (Score:2)
This is often what happens when the DBAs don't respond fast enough to developer requests or make them fill out too many forms.
The programmers just "work around" them by repurposing some other unused field.
DBAs: take notice!
Re: (Score:1)
Lawyers, DBAs, and system administrators sometimes tend to think that everyone else works for them, not the other way around. (I've been two of those three at various points in my career.)
My favorite (Score:1)
Domain: credit cards. Field: "Status" (or thereabouts). Range of values: "O" for open, "C" for closed, "I" for inactive, NULL for open or status unknown (have to check other variables to be sure).
Re: (Score:1)
Except for the gratuitous NULL, that doesn’t seem too bad?
Re: (Score:1)
It wasn't too bad once we figured it out. The formal documentation only had the alphabetical codes and NULLs were about 50% of the dataset.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, if it's MySQL it's bad since that data should probably be an enum and MySQL (particularly older versions) will insert an empty string if you get the enum value wrong. However, even then I wouldn't use an enum. That should probably link to a separate "cc_status" table or something like that. You can then more easily insert new statuses, add human readable descriptions for each status (often with enums I see human readable versions hard-coded in the program), and you don't have to worry about changin
Re: (Score:1)
The database is a terrible place to put any string that might be subject to i18n.
I agree with the rest of your points.