On Wed, 21 Apr 2010, Thom Brown wrote:
I have a mailing list table, and 2 of the columns contain values which have to be from a list.
Thom, From 2 lists?
These are country and status.
And each is from a separate list, correct?
There are 237 possible countries and 3 possible statuses.
Now I know some people would assign a sequence ID (surrogate key) to the country and status values,
Why? These two fields do not define a unique row, do they? If not, then neither is a candidate key and should be treated as a regular attribute.
... and have them looked up in separate tables to get the textual value, but I think I'll still have those tables, just without an ID column, so 1 column for both the countries and statuses tables. This means storing the proper value in the main table.
You could have a table with two columns: abbreviation and name. Then you could copy that table from the Internet to get the data.
So instead of name, email, country, status 'mr smith', 'emailaddress@xxxxxxxxxxx', 44, 2 'mrs jones', 'me@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx', 21, 1
Not only is more work, but it's confusing and unnecessary.
I'd have name, email, country, status 'mr smith', 'emailaddress@xxxxxxxxxxx', 'China', 'Registered' 'mrs jones', 'me@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx', 'Belgium', 'Unconfirmed'
Sure.
Are there any serious downsides to this? If so, what would you recommend?
Nope. Not even flippant downsides. Rich -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
