On 08/23/2012 11:56 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:
On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 8:19 AM, Gauthier, Dave <dave.gauthier@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I have a table with a column called "last_name". I have one customer who
likes to articulate queries and updates for this using column name
"last_name" (no problem there) but another who likes to call it "lname" and
yet another who likes to call it "surname". So 3 different names for the
same physical column in the table.
Here's an out-of-the-box suggestion.
Drop the column altogether and have a single column "name". Trying to
divide names up never works properly. Does "surname" mean family name?
Not all cultures put the family name last. Is "last_name" simply the
part of the name after the last space?
+1 to that, and it gets way worse:
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
and while you're at it, read this:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
--
Craig Ringer
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