Ok, I'll bite. The 'current consensus' in any system is tenuous and not an arbiter of its effectiveness. In this case, data modelers hoping to save a column. arrggg. It flies in the face of data normalization and pushes the problem down the line. Forgive my simple linear thinking on the immensely complex topic of 'your name here and here and here'. Sincerely, alias ;)
On Sat, Nov 9, 2019 at 2:26 PM Simon Slavin <slav...@bigfraud.org> wrote: > Since I don't see many posts yet this weekend, please excuse one of mine > which isn't exactly on charter. Feel free to argue me out of posting in > personal (offlist) email. > > In a previous job I got to see databases made up by all sorts of other > people and organisations. Every time I saw a field called 'firstname' or > 'second name' or 'surname' or 'familyname' I groaned. So I was nodding > along as I read this: > > < > https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ > > > > I think this one is unusually well-written. > > In case you want to know how best to handle personal names, the current > consensus seems to be to use a single field containing the whole name, > which can be searched by substring. Computer systems for places with > non-Roman character sets sometimes use two fields: name in local characters > (Chinese, Devanagari, etc.) and name in Roman characters. > > Also note that current privacy legislation in the US and EU means you are > not allowed to ask for anything like 'full legal name' unless you cannot > run your business without it. Ask them for their name, and store what they > tell you, with the words in the order they gave them. If you need to sort > people in name order (think very hard about why, first), create a field > called 'sort order' and populate it yourself. Sorting is your problem, not > that of the people you're sorting. > > Part of a continuing series including falsehoods about dates, times, > places, street addresses, gender, relations, phone numbers, taxes, and > amounts of money. > > Good luck, and watch your back. > _______________________________________________ > sqlite-users mailing list > sqlite-users@mailinglists.sqlite.org > http://mailinglists.sqlite.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users > _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@mailinglists.sqlite.org http://mailinglists.sqlite.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
