I'm leaning toward a construct where there is a permanent address table, as usual keyed by an autonum column that should rarely need changing at all (as in an eminent domain condemnation or some such), a second table which contains that autonum column along with a person/company link and two date columns, dtin and dtout so that historical records are preserved. The same thing should work well with telephone numbers which of course should also rarely need editing themselves; only the linking tables need frequent changes. As for spiderwebs and terabytes, I'm pretty sure that going more and more relational actually ends up saving bandwidth over flat files. And there is something beautiful about spiderwebs. Finally, I'd love to put every address within 20 miles in my database so people could actually pick their (properly formatted) addresses by entering a few numbers and a couple of letters without having to type and retype it with all the errors, etc. Maybe the post office has it for downloading, or mapquest???....
On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 5:33 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Further to what Albert suggested: One app that I wrote relied heavily > on people spending time at 2 different homes. The address table was > separate, with a text column (free-form) that indicated the "type" of > address it was (winter, summer, school, mother). > > You'd go into their record and select a "current" address and enter > an "until date" if you knew one. That record would be marked with an "X" > for being current. Obviously when you enter a new person the first > address is marked with an "X". > > At the first startup of the day, it would look at "until date" <= today > and > send a list to the printer so the users would know they should either > select another address to be current or change/erase the date. > > Karen > > > In a message dated 2/21/2012 10:52:01 PM Central Standard Time, > [email protected] writes: > > Yep, I would have a Persons master table, a PersonStatus table and a > PersonAddress table containing address(es) with a switch to indicate > Active or Inactive status, and follow that along. If a person lives in > Hawaii for the winter and in British Columbia in the summer, both > addresses would be in the PersonAddresses table with one only allowed to > be active at any given time. Saves a lot of keying. You could go as far > as PersonPhones if you really need to, adding a phonetype column to > indicate cell, land, satellite, fax ... > > Albert > > > -- William Stacy, O.D. Please visit my website by clicking on : http://www.folsomeye.net
