Mitch Wheat - Treat the cause, not the symptoms!

I’ve always had a good laugh at Oracle for having a 30 character limit on table/column/index names (and probably other objects I don’t know about)

Mentioned here on StackOverflow:

“Not just millions of lines of DBA written code, but plenty of oracle internal code no doubt too. This topic came up in a session with Steven Feuerstein and he said he didn't think they would ever change it.”

“They couldn't exactly trumpet it as a new feature, either... they'd spend a lot of time extending the limit, and then announce "you can now use names longer than 30 characters!". They'd be the laughing stock”

While writing SQLDiagCmd (a runner for Glenn Berry’s SQL Server diagnostic scripts), I re-discovered that Excel 2010 still has a limit of 31 characters for Worksheet names (and several weird bits of behaviour relating to that limit). Really?!? Why would anyone want more than 31 characters for a work sheet name? It is 2013 right, not 1970?

Add that to the fact that worksheet names have to be unique (I understand the need for that), and Voila! unnecessary code to guarantee uniqueness with 31 characters! Someone please tell me there’s a way to override this ludicrous limit…