From time to time I send this article at my job. Just as a distress call about our system.
Normal_gaussian 2 hours ago [-]
There is something to reading something from 20 or 40 years ago and having a professional existential crisis.
stevage 2 hours ago [-]
Reminds me a lot of a final year group software project at uni. Instead of building a solution for our client we built a kind of meta solution, then ran out of time to actually solve his problem in it.
kristianp 3 hours ago [-]
I've seen these custom fields tables in a number of database schemas I've worked with in the past. It adds dynamism to a fixed table structure. I wonder how CRMs do it these days without having poor performance at scale?
Normal_gaussian 3 hours ago [-]
Being able to partial index into JSON has made this much more straight forwards now than ever before, but historically pre-creating empty indexed custom columns was somewhat common (leading to hard limits like max 20 custom tags), as was EAV (which arguably is inner-platform).
There are more solutions than these, but until you're at truly custom DB scale with a specific problem here, these will solve it for you.
bob1029 2 hours ago [-]
I've made the mistake of creating this kind of problem many moons ago. The dream was to have non-technical domain experts implement the product. I did not know at the time that this was a cursed problem. Probably one of the most cursed, in fact.
Putting it my sql based scripting engine took 2 weeks. Backing it out is going on 4 years now. Perhaps the biggest technical misstep I've ever made. It's kind of like Pandora's box because once the non technical people feel the speed/control, they'll never let it go. You could place a literal money printer on their desk as an alternative and they'd reject it if you took their new power away.
paulddraper 42 minutes ago [-]
That seems successful.
bob1029 28 minutes ago [-]
If you are into constructing fiefdoms in places they were definitely not intended to be constructed, then certainly.
dvh 6 hours ago [-]
It's 2025 why are you gluing SQL strings? Don't even use it as an example!
zahlman 6 hours ago [-]
The post is clearly marked as being from 2006.
JadeNB 4 hours ago [-]
Also it's from TheDailyWTF, not an endorsement of the practices there even in 2006.
recursive 5 hours ago [-]
Perhaps to facilitate a dynamically generated schema.
There are more solutions than these, but until you're at truly custom DB scale with a specific problem here, these will solve it for you.
Putting it my sql based scripting engine took 2 weeks. Backing it out is going on 4 years now. Perhaps the biggest technical misstep I've ever made. It's kind of like Pandora's box because once the non technical people feel the speed/control, they'll never let it go. You could place a literal money printer on their desk as an alternative and they'd reject it if you took their new power away.