We have a data base where a column has six atomic values stored in pairs of mixed alpha-numerical values (1A P7 S0). The data values are foreign keys. In order to retrieve the values then you have to use left/right/substring functions. The name of the column? INVENTOY_CODES. Needles to say, it has nothing to do with inventory.

But the best. On a maintenance screen is a text field associated with a record. Assume that the field would be in the same table as the main record, right? Nope. It's attached to a logging table that records about a dozen or so different transactions against a parent record. Over the years, the table contains thousands of records against the any one parent item. The little text field? It merrily follows along, repeating itself over and over and over again. And is there a ID key relationship between the text field and the actual table it's associated with? Nope again! So, as a work around we have the data entry clerks list the records manually so we can then use a function to align the parent records to the corresponding text value to generate reports.

1) Parent 1) Text

2) Parent 2) Text

3) Parent 3) Text etc.