Abnormal Form

I just ran across this engaging story by Tim Gorman about his experience with the "revolutionary" generic database model for a CRM application. This idea of putting all your eggs in one basket and treating a database as a Bag-O-Data seems to be strangely alluring to some people. I ran into this very early in my career, when I was very green. Our lead programmer was adamant that everything was an "object", and therefore every entity, no matter how unrelated, belonged in the same central table, named… "OBJECTS". I was very much a newbie at databases in general, but I knew there was something terribly wrong with this idea.