MySpace Data Modeling

!{border:1px solid black;}http://www.boboroshi.com/assets/2006/12/20/tourlist.png (List of tourdates from myspace with varying presentation styles)!

I am almost constantly amazed how MySpace has been able to survive with the disaster of code behind the scenes. I always knew the table structure was a mess, but it seems that not just the view section (in a model-view-controller hierarchy) needs work.

I was adding a tour date in a rather standard form that didn’t change much from the last time I added a tour date. The only thing I really noticed was that the state field now actually had the state names as opposed to the postal abbreviations.

After submitting two new dates and then looking at the my page, I was surprised to see a mix in the presentation between the postal acronyms and the state names. Instead of a logical lookup table, this is just writing strings.

Additionally, if you do not know the zip code, myspace tells you that “this does not appear to be a known city.” New York, New York. Not a known city.

!http://www.boboroshi.com/assets/2006/12/20/cityloss.png (screen grab of myspace error message saying new york, new york is not a known city)!

And Murdoch paid $650 million for that. Wow.