>>>>I just counted and I am joining 26 tables to produce a line of information from this database which has been normalised to the point of oblivion.
>>>
>>>Abnormalised ?
>>
>>I used to like the idea of not duplicating data. Very tidy.
>>
>>But this has taken it to new levels
>>
>>At least its giving my MySQL knowledge a good workout.
>
>A couple of years ago i took over a VFP app that had been about as over-engineered as it could be ( brilliantly, but nonetheless it made your teeth hurt)
>
>Used guids for all keys and had a table naming convention which yielded stuff like "cccarrier" and so there were Hung Not fields like "ccccarrierkey"
>
>A lot of tables had 6 guid fields and one datum.
>
>Very tricky to try to figure out where my just being too stupid to intuit the complexity of the model ended and the madness of the original designer began. <s>

You know you're in trouble when you keep drilling down and never come to any data :-)