odbc has a character limit of 8000 .... so that is a physical limit beyond which things get highly frustrating.
I worked on a table that had 138 columns .. it was horribly written and could have been normalised. Although this database seem to of been the creation of someone wondering why there are conventions in database design and deciding to test them all at once.
Having very wide flattened tables is fairly common when you get into data warehousing and reporting servers. They are just a lot faster and mean that you don't have to store your database entirley in ram for performance.
