Re: Categorized lookup tables?

This "monster of all lookups" approach fails on another point. Not all lookups are single values; you often have to look up ranges of values, with the most common being date ranges, such as sale seasons, religious holidays, fiscal calendars, etc.

I never understood why anyone would want to force all look up codes into string datatypes. Dewey Decimal codes are best done as INTEGER or DECIMAL() datatypes, abbreviaitons codes as fixed length strings, etc.

I have a whole chapter in DATA & DATABASES devoted to how to design an encoding scheme and a taxonomy of the type of encoding schemes. Received on Wed Jul 04 2001 - 15:58:56 CDT