Re: mixed case text

Far be it from me to call you a dinosaur, but it is my personal opinion that unless you have a strong business reason to the contrary, text should be stored in the database in its "natural" form, i.e. mixed case where appropriate. No function that I can even conceive of could handle the variety of address forms/names/etc and output them in a "proper" form. Even if you get it pretty close, there are going to be more than a few exceptions. And there's no excuse not to allow mixed case in the database now that you can use functional indexes. Once again this is just my
(possibly humble) opinion from my own personal experience.

• Philip
  • Original Message ----- From: "Steve McClure" <smcclure_at_usscript.com> To: "Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L" <ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com> Sent: Wednesday, September 11, 2002 9:38 PM Subject: mixed case text

I just had a heated, well perhaps not heated, but certainly adversarial discussion with my manager regarding mixed case text. My position...Keep it out of the database. His position ...same case text looks amateurish when output, and the database should readilly accomodate it. He almost seems to think my objection is related to a shortcoming in Oracle..."I used to do that in Clipper 12 years ago".

It is my opinion that if you want to output mixed case data you should use functions to "beautify" text like names and addresses. My biggest objection is that by allowing mixed case text in a table, you are setting up developers (and me) to write queries that don't work. In order to get proper results from a query you have to upper() every single query involving the columns in question. To me this is far more annoying/complicated than calling functions when writing the relatively few reports that require "Proper" text.

So am I a dinosaur? Maybe it is because I am not writing the reports that are complicated by my decision to upper() everything while loading.

Steve

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Author: Steve McClure
  INET: smcclure_at_usscript.com

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