Can you imagine what LLBLGEN would make of this DB!!?

http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/73623.aspx

niceeeeeee

It's shame we would loose such a potential customer of LLBLGen Pro.

Maybe in V.4

I saw that entry too .. though it's not that uncommon to have cryptic tablenames. I just always wonder why they deliberately choose NOT to use logical names like 'customer' or 'order'... Must be a typing thing I guess

Cryptic table names would be bad, but consider that the actual WTF was that each table was a 'customer' - DDL was used to create a new table for each customer ID assigned!

Instead of using "CustomerId" columns on several of the tables, the application uses ... tables ... with the CustomerId appended to the end of the table. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to envision the query needed to aggregate all "infoset" tables.

stoneyowl wrote:

Cryptic table names would be bad, but consider that the actual WTF was that each table was a 'customer' - DDL was used to create a new table for each customer ID assigned!

Instead of using "CustomerId" columns on several of the tables, the application uses ... tables ... with the CustomerId appended to the end of the table. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to envision the query needed to aggregate all "infoset" tables.

The company I work for has been writing an accounting package for the past 17 years.. The original version was in DOS..then they moved to FoxPro.. and only within the past 2-3 years have they started moving to .NET. Remarkably, ALL of the tables are cryptic like that. The interesting thing is that I think those table names make sense to accounting people. Note also that there are probably 60 cryptically named tables in our database.. each database averages about 8GB.

True, legacy systems may carry baggage forward - I have been involved with a system which was originally written in COBOL on an IBM MF, then I migrated it to PowerBuilder ( ) (Y2K related, I had 3 months to get it off the mainframe), then to VB6.0, now to C#. At each iteration I have tried to rename tables and move closer to normalization of the database.

stoneyowl wrote:

Can you imagine what LLBLGEN would make of this DB!!?

http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/73623.aspx

ROFLMAO

Priceless. I think this post just made my day.

In mainframe environments it was quite common to produce table names like

XQ671A XQ651B ...

and have a "decode" table somewhere which says what they really represent. It is a viable technique if you have a limited number of characters to use for the name and hundreds or thousands of tables.