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Are there any justifications for these practices?
Yes; laziness and lack of understanding of the relational model. Not that I'd suggest you tell this your boss or whoever is telling you to do this, especially in the current job market... But try to push them in the right direction and keep it in mind for the future when you're architecting databases and telling others what to put in them. And always think about the "what if" scenarios! Remember that in a year, "we won't ever need to query this data" will invariably become, "we need a report based on the fifth member of that delimited list, for all of our 10,000,000 customers, and it has to run in under a second."
Check out this site... lots of great content on this and related subjects:
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Adam Machanic
whoisactive