[BobRodes]

That could be a reason, Lordofduct, except for the part where someone is asking the developer to add more columns to add more of what would be attributes in a MV system. Whoever it was didn't have your "WTF" moment there and should have.

It sounds more like the individual who put this together didn't go to the trouble of studying even the first normal form of relational database modeling. To be honest, it sounds like that individual would have had difficulty understanding it anyway.

I would redesign the thing. Making the investment will turn a profit over time in total cost of ownership.

[haseren4]

CodingSup3rnatur@l-360, on 18 March 2013 - 03:30 AM, said:

I definitely feel your pain on this one, Nakor. I'm current trying to integrate a simple (or at least it should have been) data entry application into my new software at work that has been very poorly designed. For example,

* It uses a single table with 215 columns. Like in your case, many of the columns are name1, name2, name3 etc.
* For the slightly larger fields on the GUI, each field is split by line into about 5 different database columns, for no obvious reason.
* Each column is so poorly named that you can hardly tell what their purpose is. For example, Num, Co and ComI12
* The person who designed it doesn't seem to have heard of the bit data type in SQL Server, as they insisted on using strings for simple boolean values (as in 'Yes'/'No', and a few other domain specific booleans).
* There is also the occasional violation of 1NF, just to keep me on my toes.
* Finally, pretty much all the input was unconstrained, so there is all sorts of crap in the fields that shouldn't be there, and indeed there is data missing when there shouldn't be..

Honestly, it's torture just looking at it, never mind trying to do anything with it />/>.

That is just unforgivable.