DRY is also a good practice!

So many different people ask, so i spread the idea each time. I fear linking to a writeup would be ignored, and using the same terminology each time would get boring. It even get's boring here (at the office) when i see people making the same stupid mistakes over and over again. I could wish for variety, at least. :)

he best practice would be a programming style/ SQL abstraction which allows defining the fields just once and automatically checks a table's integrity at compile-time.

If not for perl being the lazy coder's language, i would strongly disagree with that statement, demanding that the coder know what he is dealing with before touching it.