A story of how a junior dev becomes a little less junior. The original implementation was the 'obvious' one, and not terrible. Then experience of the live sys

A story of how a junior dev becomes a little less junior. The original implementation was the 'obvious' one, and not terrible. Then experience of the live system + MySQL demonstrated problems with that. So a non-obvious but better-performing solution was implemented instead. Great! Junior dev walks away with a mistrust of both long repeated strings appearing in a DB table, AND a mistrust of database internals. A fine lesson indeed. (And remember, this was the era of the all-powerful DBA who could ruthlessly de-normalise your schema at a moments notice to improve performance).