Re: Best practices for "Gender Column"

From: gazzag <gareth_at_jamms.org>
Date: Wed, 8 Jul 2009 03:03:18 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <229608c4-dd1a-4fbd-8192-3c76ac747ab3_at_b15g2000yqd.googlegroups.com>

On 7 July, 21:30, jose <josed..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

The DECODE function could display 1 as "M", 2 as "F" and NULL as "Unknown".

HTH -g Received on Wed Jul 08 2009 - 05:03:18 CDT