[Cialug] SQL wizardry possible?

[David Champion]

Matthew Nuzum wrote:
> 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. :-/
> 

Yeah, Paris Hilton is "all the rage" too. That doesn't make her smart
either. :)

-dc