Ha ha ha - Oh Simon.....what *have* you done? [Apologies for the noise - could not resist this one.]
On Sat, 9 Nov 2019 at 19:26, 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
