Re: Database design

Steve McDaniels wrote:

> 
> 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?

So far I have been under-whelmed by the responses. I had thought that the whole thing of standardization would be so ingrained by now that scores of people would come forward with references to documented standards and that basically all of these peple would ultimately cite pretty much the same materials.

What I have found is that a lot of places have internal (and therefore proprietary) standards but that there doesn't seem to be any universal standard. I had even thought that in the world of EDI there might be a standard set forth and no one has made any references to that either.

It makes me start to wonder how companies that do a great deal of international business handle such things.

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Received on Fri Jan 14 2000 - 06:42:23 CST