Database spaghetti Aha - it's been a while since the last entry, but I have an excuse. Having given up on the prospect of this job providing me with meaningful work, I've been helping out a friend with a couple of tasks (not for pay - just for something to do).

He asked me to look at the database for the software he's been working on - it's a mess. Just looking at it quickly revealed it was un-normalised, was lacking foreign keys (and often primary keys!) and the naming scheme was up the spout. At least 15 of the tables have a primary key called "RecordId"!!!

This all sounds like a lot of nerd-speak, but what it really means is the database is poorly designed and I'm trying to fix it up a bit. I had trouble getting to grips with it at first - the database is the biggest I've ever worked on. So in the end I did the smart thing and printed it out.



54 pages stuck together. Since that photo was taken I was able to ignore quite a few of the tables, so now:



28 pages stuck together when I took that photo. I've got it down to 14 now. Of course, the number of pages is kind of meaningless. But at least it gives an idea of progress.

I'm about to go and print out version 4 and stick it all together. What fun!  ¶ 1:00 PM