Class::DBI and stalinesque hiding of THE TRUTH

[Dave Cross]

Quoting Ovid <publiustemp-londonpm at yahoo.com>:

> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Dave Cross <dave at dave.org.uk>
>
>> No. I feel that way too sometime. But most of the time I'm a lot
>> calmer and just want to force them to read "Database in Depth"[1]
>>  until they understand it all.
>> [1] http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/databaseid/
>
> A lovely, lovely book.  A book which,regrettably, is still boxed up   
> on the other side of the pond.  However, the book still expects   
> folks to know the basics of normalization.

It is a great book (see my review at  
http://dave.org.uk/reviews/dbdepth.html) but it's not one that you  
could seriously expect to be read by everyone who just wants to build  
a database backend for their web site's forum.

> Did I tell y'all the one about the company which used the customer's  
>  phone number as the key to their sales history?  Took me a while to  
>  figure that one out.  Made me want to issue a "DROP TABLE" command   
> with a chainsaw.  Of course, since I was forbidden to make any   
> changes to the database ... :(

If we're trading database horror stories. The music database I worked  
on takes some beating. They had a table for artists. But the list of  
tracks available from that artist was a comma separated text field in  
the artist table. Actually it was _three_ comma separated text fields  
in the artist table, one for the title, one for the filename and one  
for a boolean flag indicating that the track could be downloaded.  
Lucky for them that song titles never contain commas isn't it. Oh.  
Wait...

Luckily for me, I was able to treat this database as a "prototype" and  
rebuild it from scratch.

Dave...

-- 
Site: http://dave.org.uk/
Blog: http://blog.dave.org.uk/