Best practices for "Gender Column"
From: jose <josedial_at_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 13:30:48 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <c00970a7-a56c-4066-8782-ccecdb81ddea_at_d32g2000yqh.googlegroups.com>
This days, I'm participating in the design of a new application for a Biotechnology company. I found the following:
-In some applications they use for (Gender/sex column) NUMBER(1) and
this could be Null because in some cases they don't know the Gender until they get the genotype, but in this applications the values are (1 = Male , 2 = Female and Null ), the problem with this solution is that in some cases when the people is reading the information always is asking 1 is for male o for female ?
-In the new application I suggest to use VARCHAR2(1) for this column
and this must be NOT NULL, and the possible values must be M=Male F=Female and U= Unknown. I think is better use a value against a Null because of the indexes, I mean in case we decided to index by this column the null values will never be indexed.
Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 13:30:48 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <c00970a7-a56c-4066-8782-ccecdb81ddea_at_d32g2000yqh.googlegroups.com>
This days, I'm participating in the design of a new application for a Biotechnology company. I found the following:
-In some applications they use for (Gender/sex column) NUMBER(1) and
this could be Null because in some cases they don't know the Gender until they get the genotype, but in this applications the values are (1 = Male , 2 = Female and Null ), the problem with this solution is that in some cases when the people is reading the information always is asking 1 is for male o for female ?
-In the new application I suggest to use VARCHAR2(1) for this column
and this must be NOT NULL, and the possible values must be M=Male F=Female and U= Unknown. I think is better use a value against a Null because of the indexes, I mean in case we decided to index by this column the null values will never be indexed.
I'm posting this to here any comments, thanks, Uriel. Received on Tue Jul 07 2009 - 15:30:48 CDT