I guess I've come away with a totally different takeaway than most. This post is rather strong on the blame game, which could be fixed by one thing... RTFD! (R

I guess I've come away with a totally different takeaway than most. This post is rather strong on the blame game, which could be fixed by one thing... RTFD! (Read The F**in Docs!) - I only skimmed the post, but its definitely something that would have been avoided had some SQL documentation or introduction been read. I'd argue one of the huge things that differentiates "senior" developers from all the "other" levels - we're not smarter or more more clever than anyone else - we read up on the tools we use, see how they work, read how others have used them before... I understand this was from 2002, but MySQL came out in 1995 - there was certainly at least a handful of books on the topic. Perhaps when just starting off as an intern, you may be able to argue that you are 'operating in a vacuum' but any number of introductory SQL books or documentation could quickly reveal solutions to the problem encountered in the post. (Some of which are suggested in these comments). Of course we all make mistakes in software - I definitely could see myself creating such a schema and forgetting to add any sort of indexing - but when running into performance issues later, the only way you'll be able to know what to do next to fix it is by having read literature about details of the tools you are using. Operating in a vacuum? Then break out of it and inform yourself. Many people have spent many hours creating good documentation and tutorial on many many software tools - use them.