Can you give a hint of how you can possibly come up with 200 columns in a design? I can't think of anything in life that has 200 aspects that can't be somehow factored out into some other subaspect hierarchy.

For example, I recall the word "campaign" earlier in this thread (or maybe hallucinated it). If that's the case, and some of these column names are perhaps the names of each state, then you can turn the table sideways and create 50 separate rows per event in a one-to-many relationship instead of having 50 sets of columns (maybe 4 per thing?) to record the same thing.

I dunno, but my gut tells me that ending up with 200 columns in an SQL table is a bit like ending up with 200 Perl scalar variables instead of an array. A symptom of that is a lot of variables with similar names differing only by some data-like aspect, like a serial number (1, 2, 3, 4) or a state (WA, OR, CA, ID, ...).

---

update: As I was chatting with a friend about this problem a bit later, I realized that the problem like this usually results from improperly taking "3 dimensional data" (values depend on 3 inputs) and mapping it to a 2 dimensional table naively: primary key column is one dimension, other columns represent a cross of the other two dimensions. The proper solution is to have two key columns represent two of the three dimensions, and the column names be the third (and hopefully the most diverse and consistent).