One field for all data. Have you seen this before?

[Mel]

I have some PHP screens that have a lot of fields. I am used to having a one-for-one match between screen fields and database columns following database normalization rules.

I have several screens which I have seen the previous developers would implode/explode arrays of all fields into one column. If you look at the attached screen print, you will notice the all of the data in the col_values field. The data is tab-delimited.

Has anyone seen this type of coding? Why would someone code this way? Any ideas?

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[phphelp]

There’s really no way to know for sure without asking that person…

But if I was to guess…

1. Trying to save disk space
2. Trying to make the queries run faster.

[JimL]

And failing miserably while doing so.

I have never seen this in any real world applications, it is so bad database design it’s not even worth having it in a database, it could just as well be stored in a text file.