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Pilot fish who's a computer science professor gets a call from a former student stumped by a database problem -- one that should be pretty easy to solve.
"This was not one of my most stellar students," fish admits. "It seems they had set up a database for a new state agency and the system was running very slowly.
"I did a small amount of consulting on the side, so I agreed to take a look."
Turns out the database is rather strangely organized. The explanation? Former student tells fish it's set up for ease of data entry.
And for retrieval? "No problem," former student says. "We created an index for every field so you can look up anything quickly. We even created Soundex codes for every last name, and created an index for the Soundex codes too."