We complain a lot about others. I'll toss out my own dork up from today.

Customer: "Can we add more than X widgets? There seems to be a limit."

Me: "Wut? Lol no I didn't limit.... wait a second."

SQL... field type... varchar

-hand to forehead-

A varchar field... limits the _amount_ of widgets... what?

@alexbrooklyn It's where I store the widgets that they can add ... but varchar is limited to 255 characters, I kinda forgot about that.

@N00bPancakes is it a long string of widget names or ids?

@N00bPancakes

Spanking time!

@alexbrooklyn widget names in this case. Even ids wouldn't save a lot of space as the "names" are pretty short / nonsensical.

@N00bPancakes I would've probably gone with a widget tables and a ma y-to-many table for users and widgets.

But I'm sure that approach has more disadvantages compared to the textfield

@alexbrooklyn I hope that was sarcasm.

@IntrusionCM The first or second paragraph

@alexbrooklyn Last *sad puppy eyes*

What ist love... Don't hurt me....

I’d also use a many:many relation.
Space is cheap, especially for a table with three int columns! 😂

Depending on implementation that’s 12 bytes (plus db overhead) per row/widget. Fair, the join would take a few more ms, but that’s really just moving the load from your app (string splitting) to the database, which is probably faster anyway.

@IntrusionCM I was trying to not be too judgemental or without context for once

If I had to review it tho, I'd have killed the guy and forced the many-to-many approach

It's an denormalization...

And one of the most dangerous.

Storing multiple references in one field in a referential database leads to all kinds of fuckity - since now the handling of uniqueness, data integrity and so in lies on the application side.

I've had to migrate similar problems and it usually ended with writing a parsing program...

In the worst case, I had to play whack a mole and generate an XLS which some very unlucky coworkers had to double check manually - since the reference in the varchar was sometimes cut off, sometimes duplicated, sometimes pointing to null....

Fun. Not.

To be clear the widget names are the primary key / ID of something else in the DB.

I was being very vague as the story wasn't intending to go through the whole process here ;)

I call them widget names because that is the end result for the user...

Come on, everyone! Let’s not all roast him over something he admitted was bad! That’s just mean.

@Root Thank you.

I don't want to get into mega corp 5000's choices are bad / how they came to such decisions.

Sometimes you work within the system before you can change how they do things.

Also you pick longer fields....