They let the intern access the production db. The company is one of the biggest hosting and internet service companies in the country. The db was SQL but had no primary key.
I was the intern. I normalized it to 3NF as part of my internship project.
Congrats on not fucking it up (presumably). That must have been a lot of pressure, as an intern.
My first internal question in my head was “how the fuck have they been living with this???” Of course the first thing I did was to inform the boss that I have to take a snapshot backup, and that working directly on prod is ill-advised.
He said “sure kid, you know better than me.” WAIT WHAT?!
When I came back to the university and submitted my report, my lab advisor was also like what the fuck.
Everyone was perplexed all the way to the department chair.
