I once worked for a company whose staff was so ignorant of database design they suddenly began getting errors on their website and could not understand why. They asked me to look into it and the offending insert/update statements were on a table that had over 200 columns. I calculated the maximum size if each of the columns were populated and it exceeded 24,000 bytes. About 75 of the columns were blob fields and there were several repeated fields (such as title1, title2, title3, etc).

After I was able to stop hysterically laughing, I communicated the problem to the client to the obvious blank look of not comprehending why that kind of problem could not be addressed in a couple hours of bug fixing.

Karen Gayda

MCP, MCSD, MCDBA

Edited by - kgayda on 12/09/2003 11:11:15 AM