Re: Question(s) on converting names and addresses to UNICODE

The one time I think it is good to separate name fields is in name matching routines. In the US, when trying to match their legal "social security or tax" name, it's important to know 1st middle and last as it was legally registered.
KIM SMITH
KIM A SMITH
Kim AMY SMITH
KIM AMY SMITH-ROSEN
and these are only "American" names.
What are the application requirements ? If this is a global company and US or other goverment Customs (or even payroll) involved-may have to break the names down.
(this has been an interesting discussion)
Jim Franz

----- Original Message ----- From: "Scott Klement" <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Midrange Systems Technical Discussion" <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, July 22, 2009 3:27 AM
Subject: Re: Question(s) on converting names and addresses to UNICODE

Hi Alan,

Handling unicode is at once both easy and hard. To make your database
fields into unicode fields is easy. Just declare them as graphic and
give them a CCSID like 1200...

How to populate them is a different matter altogether. Especially if
you are using legacy user interfaces, like 5250.

Alan Shore wrote:

what would be considered a good "size" for fields like
first name
last name
Address lines

Yikes... that is an incredibly complicated question. When you are
talking about the USA, it's often reasonable to code a "first name",
"middle initial" and "last name" field. But even in the USA this is
often inadequate! Many folks have multiple first names, multiple middle
names or even multiple (often hyphenated) last names.

And that's just the USA! In many cultures, the "first" name (the name
printed first) is actually the family name, whereas the last name (the
name printed last) is the given name. Is it reasonable to refer to the
fields as first and last?

What of Arabic names that can have many parts? (I've seen some as long
as 10 words.)

Spanish/Hispanic names often have two surnames.

Googling finds the following discussion on Stack Overflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/128099/what-is-the-longest-human-name-you-can-expect
(or, http://tinyurl.com/6lpvfj )

The recommendation seems to be: don't separate the name into pieces
(first, last, etc). Instead, just have one field for a person's name,
and let it include their given name, their family name, etc, as they
prefer it to be. Then, make the field very long :)

Read the stack overflow thread... if nothing else, it's thought provoking.
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