Nothing like a good o'le Friday Smorgasbord exploring how some programmers manage to abuse databases ...

A couple months back, we got a chance to see a fantastic "Database-Driven" website that Miki Watts was lucky enough to inherit. Here's another peek into it, showing just how fantastically dynamic it is. Just incase you ever want to have 10000MB have a size of 9847, a disk size of of 3200 and displayed inbetween 50 and 30000 ... 

disk_options
SKU SizeDesc Size Meas DiskSize SortOrd Active
D000050 50 MB 50 MB 50 1 0
D000050 50 MB 50 MB 50 1 1
D000100 100 MB 100 MB 100 2 1
D001000 1000 MB 1000 MB 1000 3 1
D005000 5000 MB 5000 MB 5000 4 1
D010000 10000 MB 10000 MB 10000 5 1
D020000 30000 MB 30000 MB 30000 6 1
D030000 50000 MB 50000 MB 50000 7 1

Up next, David Graham was a bit dissapointed to learn that the developers at his work have a hard time understanding nothing. The first row in every table ...

caller_id owner_id description ...
-1 NULL 'Not Used' ...

Jakob Christensen was surprised to find a Y2K bug in 2001. Of course, it wasn't the typical Y2K bug, it was a bug that only worked in the year 2000 ... 

--calculate age based from 'ddmmyy' birthdate
SET @Age = 
   SELECT (100-(ROUND(@BirthDate/1,0,1)*1-100 * 
                           ROUND(@BirthDate/100,0,1))/1)

And Finally, W.F. discovered a rather odd database implementation of a business rule: A standard order has a maximum discount of 15% and can be canceled prior to shipping. A custom order has a maxium discount of 50% and cannot be canceled.

order_types
code name is_standard is_custom can_cancel max_disc
STND Standard Order 1 0 1 15
CUST Custom Order 0 1 0 50
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