On 12/29/2009 9:14 AM, Ethan Furman wrote:
Lie Ryan wrote:
On 12/28/2009 11:59 PM, Shawn Milochik wrote:
With address data:
one address may have suite data and the other might not
the same city may have multiple zip codes
why is that even a problem? You do put suite data and zipcode into
different database fields right?
The issue here is not proper database design, the issue is users -- not
one user, not two users, but millions of users, with no consistency
amongst them. They bring you their nice tiny list of 10,000 names and
addresses and want you to correct/normalize/mail them, and you have to
be able to break down what they gave you into something usable.
To rephrase, the issue that Shawn is referring to is the huge amount of
data *already out there*, not brand new data.
~Ethan~
The way Shawn describes the problem appears like he has problem with
"searching the database". I said, given a good index searching should
never be the problem. To make the "good index", you've got a slightly
different but easier problem to tackle: parsing. I realize that parsing
inconsistent data isn't as easy as talking about it; but it's generally
much easier than trying to fuzzily grep through the raw data.
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