Microsoft Access is at once great and the scourge of my existence. It has great power to create databases quickly and for small organizations it can be very handy. However, it also makes it easy to create databases even if it's something you really have no business doing.

I'm working on a couple of inherited projects now and there are two very annoying things. One of the annoying things is to create quasi-relational tables with no normalization. Put as many columns in as possible and repeat them in as many databases as possible. If that doesn't do enough for you copy the database a hundred times and create separate versions of it.

The other, almost more annoying practice, is to create one of these monster tables. Then instead of having your PHP script run queries on the table you create a query in Microsoft Access and run the PHP queries against the MS Access query. For annoying bonus points, rename three of the 40 fields so you have "Username" instead of "User". Repeat.

Oy.