Re: just curious - Number of Parms

[Gary Guthrie <GaryGuthrie@xxxxxxxx>]

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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