Path: news.cambrium.nl!textnews.cambrium.nl!feeder1.cambriumusenet.nl!feed.tweaknews.nl!193.201.147.73.MISMATCH!border2.nntp.ams.giganews.com!border1.nntp.ams.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!feeds.phibee-telecom.net!feeder.news-service.com!postnews.google.com!d32g2000yqh.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: jose Newsgroups: comp.databases.oracle.server Subject: Best practices for "Gender Column" Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 13:30:48 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Lines: 15 Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: 64.254.227.7 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1246998648 3251 127.0.0.1 (7 Jul 2009 20:30:48 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 20:30:48 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: d32g2000yqh.googlegroups.com; posting-host=64.254.227.7; posting-account=delc_woAAABUN3jfOZurlyCsUsRNtysh User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-Via: 1.1 MTL-ISA01 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/530.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/2.0.172.33 Safari/530.5,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) X-Original-Bytes: 2099 Xref: news.cambrium.nl 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.