[Cialug] SQL wizardry possible?

[Matthew Nuzum]

On 10/30/07, David Champion <dchampion at visionary.com> wrote:
> You should shoot the person that designed that database. I worked on a
> system that stored data similar to that - they had data fields as long
> strings of pipe delimited data, apparently because an earlier version of
> dBase had a small field count limit, and they needed more data elements
> per row. It made things very painful to work with, until we did a
> re-write and separated the data out.

Denormalization is all the rage these days. That's all this is
(serialized php data).

Sane people, however, keep the normalized data around too. :-/

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode