How to Recognize the Antipattern
If you hear phrases like the following spoken by your project team, treat it as a clue that the Jaywalking antipattern is being employed:
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“What is the greatest number of entries this list must support?”
This question comes up when you’re trying to choose the maximum length of the VARCHAR column.
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“Do you know how to match a word boundary in SQL?”
If you use regular expressions to pick out parts of a string, this could be a clue that you should store those parts separately.
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“What character will never appear in any list entry?”
You want to use an unambiguous separator character, but you should expect that any character might someday appear in a value in the list.
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