I thought it was just a myth. An urban legend people made up for a funny story on The Daily WTF. But then I witnessed it. It happened on my team. Done by people I worked with!
We were working on a system based on a very annoying CMS. We decided to move certain aspects to a database instead of however we were storing those parts in the CMS before. I joined the team near the middle the migration and helped work out some bugs on one component we were migrating to the database.
I then moved on to another aspect of the system, which had some problems with the SQL. I asked the guy on our team responsible for integrating the database in the first place to see the schemas for the tables. And that he did... he showed me the schema for the table. Yes, our entire database consisted of a single table, with columns upon columns added on for additional features.
Now, I've seen some database table monstrosities before, and heck, I've even made some when I was first learning how to work with databases, but this was coupling completely unrelated aspects of the system together. I'm talking about storing user input and system configuration in the SAME table!
So yes, that was pretty spooky.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
The "monotable".
I thought it was just a myth. An urban legend people made up for a funny story on The Daily WTF. But then I witnessed it. It happened on my team. Done by people I worked with!
We were working on a system based on a very annoying CMS. We decided to move certain aspects to a database instead of however we were storing those parts in the CMS before. I joined the team near the middle the migration and helped work out some bugs on one component we were migrating to the database.
I then moved on to another aspect of the system, which had some problems with the SQL. I asked the guy on our team responsible for integrating the database in the first place to see the schemas for the tables. And that he did... he showed me the schema for the table. Yes, our entire database consisted of a single table, with columns upon columns added on for additional features.
Now, I've seen some database table monstrosities before, and heck, I've even made some when I was first learning how to work with databases, but this was coupling completely unrelated aspects of the system together. I'm talking about storing user input and system configuration in the SAME table!
So yes, that was pretty spooky.