> I'm curious as to the why of this? Surely some applications just require a lot of tables as they deal with a lot of [different types of] data? Maybe it's my

> I'm curious as to the why of this? Surely some applications just require a lot of tables as they deal with a lot of [different types of] data? Maybe it's my lack of imagination, but I can't think how you'd create a design with hundreds of tables by hand - it would surely involve generating tables from some other source. For different types of data I'd lean more for a javascripty-style meta-table with key-values, since I bet all that different type of data wouldn't lend itself well to relations.