Wow. So much has been said here. Where to begin?

Language in the original article

I unplugged my headphones so that my wife could "read" the article right along with me. She said that he sounded just like a lot of the folks that I worked with every day. Agreed, but we were told never to use such phrases when we were on the phone with clients or vendors. This language discussion is a distraction from the points raised in the article. I agree that refraining from "street speech" is a good thing to do in articles and forum posts especially since this is an international audience. Yet I will overlook such in order to glean the meaning behind the phraseology much the same way that I would if I were meeting a person on the street who needed help.

Never and Always

These are words that I am beginning to despise as much as others despise words in the original article. If cursors are so bad why are they still allowed? Is there a move to deprecate them?

Only access data via a stored procedure? Best argument that I have heard for this point is security. With the security features built into SQL Server I don't see that a so strong of a point. Now that it means that there is a greater likelihood that your use of a procedure will use the cached plan of the last use of this procedure I get.

That you can do more advanced parameter checking in a procedure I agree with. I just don't enjoy the language as much as I do C#. I could write all my procs in the CLR. Performance would be great and I have all of these nifty functions right in the framework. Joyous, right?

Dataspacing and future scaling

These are a couple of my hot buttons. Did somebody mention 50 states? I worked at USDA and they have 54 state codes. I was alive in 1960 when we went from 48 to 50.

Are you storing IP addresses in 4 tiny ints? What happens when you have to use a V6 address?

In the U.S. we have three digit area codes for phone numbers. The old dialing rules stated that the middle digit was either a 1 or a 0. That went away a while back. There was a rule that an area code boundary could not cross a state line. That might go away soon. I am starting a new company and the phone providers tell me that I can pick my area code and the local dialing scope that I want to serve

You will see a UPC barcode on the products that you buy. They have twelve digits but you can strip off the first and last and use the remaining 10. I hope that you re not storing them a NULLable CHAR(10). As of January 2015 most systems are required to be able to handle EAN-13 codes.

We have been out of 9 digit Social Security Numbers for quite a while. Old ones are being reissued making the whole identity theft thing even harder to deal with.

You know your 9 digit ZIP Code (tm), right? You have one. These codes change with growth in areas. Don't assume that one at your house won't ever change.

What you assume to be hard and fast turns to quicksand right under your feet.

I have been bitten by things like this too. But I learned. Don't let it happen to you.