Re: Database design

I participate in lot's of dialogue about this sort of thing (dealing with direct marketing)
and I would like to offer a couple of additional suggestions (after reading the threads on this):

My org. captures world-wide consumer product registrations. We have in place several mechanisms to validate the data, name and primarily address information, supplied to us. US addresses - no problem
Canadian addresses - some problem
Mexican addresses - very difficult
South American address - very very difficult French addresses - very difficult
UK addresses - difficult
German - not yet being done
Asian (China/Japan/Indonesia) - not even planned!

We do this because
1) we find little value in storing "contacts" who have given us an invalid email address, mail address, and/or telephone number (i.e., cannot be "contacted") 2) once validated, we can associated multiple parties at the same location (for consumers, this means "household").

By far, our consumer database (15 million registrations by 10 million names in
9 million households) consists primarily of North American consumers + French + UK

With the current CRM fad, where it is often desirable to obtain consumer "contact" info directly from the consumer, we have researched and are considering developing real-time address (US) validation (re: CASS from USPS) which would not validate an address but would give us a "very likely good" ZIP + 4 plus default mail stops.

I would be very (very!) interested in knowing what references, links, etc. you come up with (develop?) about these world-wide "standards".

BTW: See also ISO stuff about country codes or yell-mail me for copy

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 Thu Jan 13 2000 - 13:09:08 CST