magarity kerns (6/11/2010)
The foul language generator is definitely the most humorous. The best bad design I've ever seen was designed by a sales manager and had rows for dollar sales by sales office (about 20) with columns for quarterly per product sales (~30 products). Every quarter, a new set of columns was made:Office Q1_Prd1 Q1_Prd2 Q2_Prd1 Q2_Prd2
NWest $xxx.xxx $xxx.xxx null____ null____
SEast $xxx.xxx $xxx.xxx null____ null____
NWest null____ null____ $xxx.xxx $xxx.xxx
SEast null____ null____ $xxx.xxx $xxx.xxx
Visually, it made a giant matrix of nulls with a strip of data diagnonally from top left. Query times were slow to say the least. It was nearing the 1024 column limit when I found a new job.
I worked on a job where there were tables like this. To make matters worse, each month they'd change the name of the table to append the previous month to the name (Data becomes Data201006) and create a new Data table with 6 new columns for the values for that month. Every so often, they'd just get rid of a few months worth of columns at the beginning of the table in the new table to keep the columns down to a few hundred.
Fortunately, I was allowed to fix this "design".
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