First, we've got Those Unstable Databases, originally posted by "tbcpp"

I used to work at a radio station, and part of my tasks included keeping the rather old automation system up and running. Now granted, this system was a 98 machine running on a beige box 500mhz and 128mb of ram, but the software was also a little at fault for the crashing it constantly was experiencing.

The college I worked for also employed a guy who had been gang pressed into fixing problems at the station from time to time. So when I came on staff he was given the task of getting me up to speed. We went over the automation system and we both complained about the fact that the logs and schedules were all stored in Access databases, but what could we do?

A few months later I found myself talking to "Jerry" (as we'll call this guy). And discussing with him how unstable the current system was. I meantioned that I was thinking of switching to Rivendell (a GPL automation system). The conversation went something like this:

Me: "The current system is trash, it crashes all the time, I'm thinking of switching to some newer software."

Jerry: "You know, the guy who ran the station before you came is writing his own software."

Me: "Really?"

Jerry: "Yeah, he's using VB."

Me: "Ah huh. Well, I've been looking at Rivendell, it looks good. And it even keeps all the data in a MySQL database."

Jerry: "Oh that's no good. This other program uses flat files which are way more stable."

Me: "More stable?"

Jerry: "Yeah, databases cause lots of headaches. They crash all the time, corrupt data, etc. Using text files is better."

Me: "Banks use databases to store data."

Jerry: "Yeah, and you know how often those systems crash?"

-- silence --

How do you answer that? Needless to say, I kindof stopped asking for his advice on things.

 

And then there's Interesting Database Field, originally posted by "JeffS" ...

I found this gem of a field in a database table for storing users' names:

MiddleInitial NVARCHAR(255)

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