

The Golden Rule of Data Manipulation - edw519
http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/jeffs/archive/2008/06/11/golden-rule-of-data-manipulation.aspx

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edw519
Great article about such a simple issue that so few get right.

His "Golden Rule" is:

"It is always easier and more flexible to combine data elements rather than to
break them apart"

So he calls for storing each segment of a data element in its own column.

Author does a good job of identifying the problem. I would have liked to have
seen a few more examples of proposed solutions.

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bayareaguy
One caveat - keeping the data split apart makes it slightly more difficult to
do certain kinds of searches (unless your system supports indexing the
concatenation).

