The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Not Your Quotidian Database

by Dan J. in CodeSOD on 2014-06-23

Ever since Nathan had been partnered with the Siberian application development team, he couldn't help wondering if they'd been sent there as punishment. He supposed the long winters got boring, and coming up with "clever" solutions was the only thing keeping the developers sane, so Nathan was used to cutting the far-flung team some slack. Usually.

One day a simple task crossed Nathan's desk: there were two systems on two servers, let's call them Aardvark and Barracuda, that had similar databases. Nathan was asked to compare the subscriber lists stored in each. Since the servers were isolated from each other, he couldn't join across them. Instead, he planned to pull a simple plaintext dump of each and diff them. On Aardvark, this was easy:

The Name of the Rows

by Dan J. in CodeSOD on 2014-06-16

When teams of enterprise software developers are cloistered away from the real world for long enough, an attitude of monasticism prevails. The fragile and fleeting concerns of mortal time fall away, and the developer's mind awakens to the greater, eternal truths that wait unsullied in everlasting Empyrean majesty. Into such a team Cory came, and, under the rigorous guidance of Brother Architect, he learned that only adherence to the Database Schema Commandments could free his soul to bask in the light of the divine.

And, lo, the First Commandment was: Thou shalt name each table having a foreign-key relationship with another table such that the name of the table having the primary key is included in the related table's name.