Re: Newbie Question: field length

Depends on whether you are going to store international addresses or not. That being true, I would highly recommend setting up a separate country table with as primary key either the 2 or 3 digit ISO code (so NL, UK, FR etc). If you don't do this you will end-up with an unnormalized design which is going to result in all kind of problems. Buy the SQL leerboek bij Rick van der Lans, published by Academic Service. If you use varchar2 or nvarchar2 to store those columns, only the actual space will be used.

Hth,

Sybrand Bakker, Oracle DBA
(Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

J. Park <johan_park_at_hotmail.com> wrote in message news:89j0hn$bnu$1_at_tesla.a2000.nl...
> I'm making my first oracle database
> and I am wondering for example
> what should be the the length of some fields
>
> this what I have at this moment.
> firstname (50 chars)
> surname (50 chars)
> initials (15 chars)
> telephone (20 chars)
> fax (20 chars)
> street (50 chars)
> zipcode (10 chars)
> city (50 chars)
> country (50 chars)
>
> Are they to long ( or to short ) ?
>
> thanks in advance,
> Johan (from Amsterdam, the Nethelands)
>
>
>
Received on Wed Mar 01 2000 - 00:00:00 CST