Re: just curious - Number of Parms

RIGHT on ! Gary.....

Vasant


-----Original Message-----
From: Gary Guthrie <GaryGuthrie@home.com>
To: RPG400-L@midrange.com <RPG400-L@midrange.com>
Date: Friday, July 28, 2000 1:20 AM
Subject: Re: just curious - Number of Parms


>John,
>
>Okay so we're MOSTLY on the same page. :)
>
>Regarding your following comment, I would strongly argue that you don't
>have a customer NUMBER. You have a customer ID! IMO, this is the same
>sort of long-standing industry "mistake" that helped lead to the Y2K
>(thought I'd NEVER type that letter combination again!) debacle.
>
>With respect to Y2K, insisting on YYMMDD type formats for dates was one
>of those habits the industry fell into and stayed in. We all know the
>resulting costs. With respect to "Customer Numbers", I submit that it is
>much better to move away from that nomenclature and begin referring to
>the entities in the fashion of "Customer IDs". Then perhaps we can get
>away from defining these entities in the database in a numeric format.
>You never know when you're going to need a value that contains something
>other than numeric-only data. Now that I've introduced the topic, let me
>use a more demonstrative example - Zip Codes.
>
>Limiting the conversation momentarily to the USA, Zip Codes often are
>defined as numeric. In fact, in the not so distant past, they were
>defined as 5 digits in length. Of course, 9 is a more appropriate length
>now. But, all of a sudden your company decides to do business outside of
>the USA -- hmm, now we need alpha characters, too! And, there's nothing
>that prevents USA standards to change to allow alpha characters.
>
>This having been said, I submit that it's best to leave numeric
>definitions to those entities that indicate quantitative data and avoid
>the type of problems mentioned.
>
>Thoughts?
>
>Gary Guthrie
>REAL Solutions Technical Support
>NEWS/400 Technical Editor
>
>
>
>> To me the bigger sin(being a data base bigot) is
>> using a 15,5 parameter variable for (say) a customer number or invoice
>> number when my data dictionary defines it as 7,0.    I want that
attribute
>> of the DB customer entity to cascade everywhere I used customer number.
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