The Daily WTF

Relational databases were at one time an absolute standard that nearly any developer could be expected to be familiar with. These days, it’s still valuable knowledge, but it’s less surprising when someone doesn’t know more than the basics- there are so many other ways one might persist data, each with their own tradeoffs. But if someone is developer for a contracting firm specializing in data driven applications, you would expect them to have a little more grounding in RDBMSes than the average developer. Well, you would expect that if you thought the contracting firm was actually selling a valuable service, instead of trying to bilk their customers and their contractors and hope nobody notices.

The important things about RDBMSes is that each table represents a relation– a set of fields that are all conceptually related, like “Employee” (with an employee ID, a name, a hire date, etc.) or “SalesListing” (with

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