Re: When to use check constraints and when to use small tables?

From: Doc Waters <davidmwaters_at_yahoo.com>
Date: 24 May 2006 21:45:16 -0700
Message-ID: <1148532316.636351.190750@j33g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>

A lot of this does come down to opinion, past experience and the type of application.

I personally like to have everything in lookup tables; this acts as documentation as well as allowing for easy updating.

On the other hand I would be making Gender a constraint (what about Unknown, depending on you system and its audience you may need this). Gender is a nicely self describing field and M, F and U would make sense as a value to someone running SQL.

As for states... I must take issue with you saying the state of the USA are unlikely to change. On a historical basis the US is well overdue for another state, haven't had any newbies since 1959... Australia on the other hand has had the same states since its inception 105 years ago and is unlikely to change; so based on that you should definitely put that in a table ;-)

Seriously, I think we just need to take pragmatic approaches to these things Received on Wed May 24 2006 - 23:45:16 CDT