Re: Named Mistakes and Questionable Practices

From: Marshall <marshall.spight_at_gmail.com>
Date: 7 Jun 2006 15:57:56 -0700
Message-ID: <1149721076.037247.320810@y43g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>

David Fetter wrote:
> Folks,
>
> Has anybody here made a list of canonical mistakes[1] that DB
> practitioners make?
>
> One example mistake is the One True Lookup Table aka the
> Entity-Attribute-Value table, as in this article:
> <http://www.dbazine.com/ofinterest/oi-articles/celko22>. Doubtless
> people have run across others. Ideally, such references would:
>
> * Name the mistake,
> * Describe the mistake's implementation, and
> * Show how and under what circumstances it's a mistake, as the above
> article does.
>
> Thanks in advance for any hints, tips, or pointers :)

In the past, we've called these "stupid database tricks" after Letterman.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.databases.theory/search?group=comp.databases.theory&q=stupid+database+tricks

Rough consensus of the winner, IIRC, was "we manage integrity in the application!"

Marshall Received on Wed Jun 07 2006 - 17:57:56 CDT