Re: SQL Humor

>> but I believe I could live to see us run out of SSNs unless the Feds do something DRASTIC, like add a digit. <<

Evolutionary, not drastic. An extra digit in the serial section of the number would do it and not effect the validation by group number. The nice thing aobut industry standards is that they have a migration path when they change. Ever what ahppens when an IDENTITY runs out and wraps? I was surprised at how often it can happen -- a bad routine keeps failing in a loop, increment the exposed counter and makes huge gaps. Since there is no audit trail on IDENTITY numbers, nobody knows until you ge to a failure point.

Look at how the UPC codes are moving from 10 to 13 digits. See any retail stores closing down because of it? Is P&G out of business? Hallmark cards alone has over 10 million products to track and they have used the industry standard barcodes for decades.

Talk about being old, do you remember "The Anti-Digit Dialing League" that got national press when we went from exchange abbreviations to all digit dialing? When we went to ten digit dialing in major metro areas, nobody said a word.

Or the various Anti-ZIP code groups? But when we went to ZIP+4, nobody said a word. Received on Fri Aug 19 2005 - 17:49:18 CEST