Re: Database design

Hi Kenneth,
My previous job was in European Headquarters of an American firm, Bentley Systems International, where we were going through exactly the same hazzle. A few things we learned:
- there exists an american publication called something like the 'Worldwide Zipcode Manual'
This lists standards and regulations for all over the world. I don't remember the exact title, if all else fails you may want to contact Marc Lebeau and/or Heather Cardy at Bentley. They are located in Exton, PA, and their domain is bentley.com
- The most difficult thing to explain was that in Europe most firms have two addresses, one is the address of their PO box, and the other one is the visiting address. All snail mail should go to the PO box, or it will be delayed. In the Netherlands postal codes for normal addresses and PO boxes are completely unrelated. It took me a while to explain that to my colleagues.
- One way or another you are going to run into problems with companies with multiple offices, multiple locations in one city, a separate accounting department, you name it. We were keeping track of in total 4 different addresses for each company.
- And publishing group (www.and.nl) was at that time selling pan-European postalcode databases. They come in various formats and you can do almost anything with it, including verify the postal code. UK has 9! different formats, so you can't easily put a mask on that field. You may want to look into their software also.

Hth,

--
Sybrand Bakker, Oracle DBA
Kenneth C Stahl <BlueSax_at_Unforgetable.com> wrote in message news:387CA134.D26FB1BF_at_Unforgetable.com...
> I have a rather odd request, but hopefully someone who reads this
newsgroup
> will know what I am looking for.
>
> I am in the process of designing a database from scratch based solely on
> the types of things that the customer is going to need.
>
> Since I don't have any previous database to reference I have to come up
> with the sizing of attributes for each of the entities.
>
> For example, I know that I will be dealing with an entity called a
CONTACT.
> One of the attributes for this contact will be an address. This address
can
> have several lines such as Suite, Street address, Room number, etc. etc.
> plus city, province/state, postal code, etc.
>
> Is there any univeral standard that defines attributes such as this? I
want
> to make my CITY attribute big enough to accomodate any possible city in
the
> world, but I don't want to make it too large. Also, while postal codes in
> the U.S. are 5-digits, I know that in other countries it is typically
> longer than that - so I would want to accomodate the largest possible
> postal code. For phone numbers I know that I'll have to deal with a
country
> code, an area code, an exchange/prefix and then the number as well as a
> possible extension. What I want to avoid is designing my database to only
> work with U.S. addresses and phone numbers.
>
> Although I've never actually worked with EDI myself, I have heard that it
> has established a standard for common attributes. Is this true? If so,
> would this be a reasonable standard to use?
Received on Wed Jan 12 2000 - 10:14:01 CST