The ultimate MySQL legacy database nightmare

Question

Table1: Everything including the kitchen sink. Dates in the wrong format (year last so you cannot sort on that column), Numbers stored as VARCHAR, complete addresses in the \'st

Answer 1

The Log Files (binary Logs) were my first thought too. If you knew how they did things you would shudder. For every row there are many many entries in the log as pieces are added and changed. Its just HUGE! For now I settled upon the Hash approach. With some clever file memory paging this is quite fast.