A terrible schema from a clueless programmer
This post is bizarre, precisely because there is nothing particularly wrong about the original schema, and the author seems to believe that the problem is that the column values were stored as strings, or that the schema wasn't in "third normal form".Which is nonsense. The problem with the original DB design is that the appropriate columns weren't indexed. I don't know enough about the problem space to really know if a more normalized DB structure would be warranted, but from her description I would say it wasn't.