It isn’t every day that I get one of those moments of clarity. (Actually, if you’re a recruiter/interviewer reading this, that’s just narrative hyperbole! I get epiphanies, like, hourly. Yeah. Hire me.)
I’ve been tasked lately with some rather… interesting… problems at work. Really the circumstances around them drive me nuts and will have me bald from ripping my hair out but I can’t and won’t get into that here. I’m having to generate a lot of records to be imported into this other system as a sort of systems integration thing. Due to the fundamental differences in their database structures, it involves a lot of redundancy.
It also involves a lot of Cartesian products. What we would normally implement as a pair (or more) of drop-down lists to pick from we’re having to store as related elements. Allow me to illustrate with a contrived example.