A humorous WTF story about a database table called three_alpha_numerics that stores all possible three-character alphanumeric combinations with a flag indicating if they are numeric. The table is used by a stored procedure to generate unique IDs via a left join to find unused values — but the procedure only ever uses the numeric rows, meaning only 1,000 possible IDs are ever available, while the rest of the alphanumeric data sits unused. The irony is that databases have native mechanisms for unique ID generation, making this elaborate workaround both unnecessary and severely limited.
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