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by adolph 1944 days ago
Reminds be of a broadly used industry specific database that packs multi-line addresses in a delimited string with an initial integer which indicates the number of lines. Some addresses were written to the database without the initial integer and were addresses in a city with East/West streets with number names. Addresses like 1425 East 34th St commonly written as 1425 E34 were casted as exponents, so an address with 1.425E37 lines, which was a problem for the ETL-downstream database that attempted to make that many rows for address lines. It caused much confusion and delay for the downstream DBAs.