"Our database has a table called Year, and below are its contents" notes Suzy T "Want to guess which column is the primary key? You said 'ReferenceId', right? Bzzt, wrong! It's YearValue, of course. I feel like populating ReferenceId with dates from the 1970's just to see what happens. And lord help us in 2013... "

 

"While browsing through a recently inherited database design," writes Jack M, "I came across the States table. It was a bit odd because it had fifty-one rows... and last I checked, we have fifty states. And then I found Row 51."

 

"I'm all for self explanatory fields in a database table," Alex writes, "but I think this one's a bit too much. Hopefully the ID column is not something like IDOfTheTableThatYouAreTryingToRetrieveDataFrom."

 

"In addition to every column in the database being a VARCHAR," wrote Derek Brooks, "I uncovered two rather interesting patterns: asterisks make for excellent Boolean flags and column names make for great first rows."

 

"While working on a site at work," Brian writes, "I got an 'Invalid column name `ID`' error. Upon further inspection, I found that someone had renamed the `ID` column to `i wonder if jan ever sent him his check?`. We still don’t know if he ever got his check, though."

 

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