• Darrel (unregistered)

    Oh, my god. I nearly hurt myself reading this. You need to add a disclaimer...

  • steveaux (unregistered)

    How about adding a column for data type and field length. Come to think of it there are a lot more attributes you could add too.


    Works great as a standardized lookup solution though. I can't tell you how many times I have been annoyed by a database with a handful of core tables and about 50 lookups. All of them named pairs.

  • Joe Celko (unregistered)

    This #@$! nightmare is so bad it has a name --EAV (entity, attribute, value) design.

  • Nick (unregistered)

    this is the most creative table design i have come across

  • Ben Adams (unregistered)

    Of course, call me crazy, but couldn't you use systables and syscolumns?

    I'm no BrainBench (tm) expert, but it just seems to me...

  • Siva Mateti (unregistered)

    This kind of design cannot handle "NOT NULLS" and other restrictions unless you write triggers on each column.

  • Russ (unregistered)

    Hey I have this great idea why dont we create a system that allows us to specify columns and tables and values for those columns. I even came up with a great name for it. I'll call it a database. And the best part is we can reimplement this "database" on a database. Then we can do it again. I mean seriously if your going to go through the trouble of doing this, why dont you just keep on going. Why not have a table that is tbl that has the same columns that define it for tblStaffDirectory. I mean you never know when we might want to add another column to tblStaffDirectory.

  • Chris Brooksbank (unregistered)

    I first thought hang on this is just a open schema - apparently this is a real technique. But then I looked at the column names and thought - No

  • Aredridel (unregistered)

    Whoa. That's like RDF without the tools to deal with RDF.

  • Joe Hammer (unregistered)

    We tried this once and ended up reproducing most of the syscolumns table... :)

  • Flex (unregistered)

    <font size="-1"><font color="#008000">protege.stanford.edu  uses exactly this strategy.
    </font></font>

  • Simmo (unregistered)

    Am I just being stupid here, or is this not just the data dictionary combined with the actual data?

    metadata and data all in the same pretty little package... yeuch

  • (cs)

    My former employer's flagship software used a layout startlingly similar to this. It was made by outsourced developers, and now I think it's your fault.

    I hate you.

  • Christian (unregistered) in reply to Siva Mateti

    There's a lot more that's wrong with this design than a simple inability to handle "NOT NULL"s, honey.

  • kotenok2000 (unregistered)

    http://web.archive.org/web/20150505094235/http://www.papadimoulis.com/alex/tblStaffDirectory.gif

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