Ha - we did that too at BMS. We were paying Oracle by the column or something like that, so people would shove entire CSV rows into a single value (because corporate said everything HAD to be in Oracle) and then parse them application-side.
We got rid of most of the DBAs because they got overfond of saying 'no' and they became a major source of friction for doing reasonable architecture. People started figuring out ways to work around the DBAs like stuffing more shit into existing columns or adding secondary tables that established new relationships between the sacrosanct tables.
A lot of the worst sins happened on Oracle databases, mostly because they were the most popular at the time, and they were the only real DB cult, so the cottage industry of specializations that told other developers not to worry their pretty little heads was especially bad.
I have to work with a DBA who has decided that nothing new gets developed using Postgres and is confident that our use cases are best served with a document db… all without knowing any of our use cases, requirements or constraints.
Now I just don’t involve him in anything unless forced.
A friend once picked up a tiny contract from Uncle Sam, requiring some changes to a Perl script that stashed values as "this/that/thenext" in one column of an Oracle table. She had not previously dealt with Perl, so I explained to her about "split" and "join".
I don't know why the developers had chosen that method.
