Given that a CHECK constraint can make use of stored procedures, you can
apply any logic that you can program. When it comes down to it tho, there
really isn't a way of stopping the "description vs. name" problem without
teaching the database to speak English (or your language of choice). The
best you could do is look for certain identifiers (number of words,
pronouns, etc.) and give a composite score to the results. If it scores
above a certain threshold, you reject it. Of course, if the name has to be
in a known list, you could check against a list in another table. That would
probably only work in Russia tho...
Jerason
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> But if you declare a free text field for surname, how do you know that
> what they put in is a *name* and not a *description*. Okay, you can ban
> numerics from the name field, but a computer can only ever enforce
> syntax. It doesn't have a clue about semantics.
>
> Cheers,
> Wol
Received on Fri Jul 12 2002 - 19:51:49 CDT
