I'm not talking about the infestation known to MS Access programmers as cascading.

I have inherrited a database whose lookup tables would give DCPeterson apoplexy. The design was done by C++ programmers so the reasoning is that a lookup table consists of an id and description, this would be an implementation of a single class therefore this represents an implementation of a single table.

Beyond the lookup tables this also means that other "classes" are also given their own tables when perhaps they shouldn't be. Consequently there are foreign keys all over the place.

There are over 200 tables in the database all cross linked to each other and to the lookup table.

One delete requires a delete from several other tables all of which get stung by DRI.

Basically the database needs scrapping and rewriting but

a) There are several very large business critical applications that interact with this database.

b) The database has to be available 24/7/363 (Yes I mean 363)

c) The redesign would take over one year even before recoding the apps