A new race

One of the database projects I’m working on involves importing data from an existing student information system (SIS). The main data being imported is student name, date of birth, gender and ethnicity. The SIS stores the ethnicity of the student, in the student table, using an ID number that corresponds to the ID in the ethnicity table. I thought I’d just do a straight import of that table in order to keep from having to create a different ethnicity ID.

I start creating tables on my development SQL Server database by looking at the SIS tables, data types and data. I do that so that I don’t accidentally create a column with a data type of integer that has to be changed later to varchar or something. When I get to the SIS ethnicity definition table, I got a little confused. I saw the normal ethnic categories: White/Caucasian, Black/African American, American Indian, etc. The last three made me say, “Huh?”.

It seems that someone in the school system decided that the available ethnic categories didn’t really fit their students so they created new categories.

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Seriously. I know at least one school was using those categories because I was able to query the student table using the ID numbers for those ethnicities. Thankfully there were only 5 or 6 results out of about 20,000 kids. I brought it to the attention of the people in charge of the SIS. They said they would get it fixed right away and couldn’t understand how it happened.

Lesson they learned: Never underestimate your users.

The unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly. - Theodore Roosevelt

07.Feb.08 Humor, Microsoft SQL