Edit Question - KnowledgeHub

Title Body

Are there any best practices (or even standards) to store addresses in a consistent and comprehensive way in a database ? To be more specific, I believe at this stage that there are two cases for address storage : you just need to associate an address to a person, a building or any item (the most common case). Then a flat table with text columns (address1, address2, zip, city) is probably enough. This is not the case I'm interested in. you want to run statistics on your addresses : how many items in a specific street, or city or... Then you want to avoid misspellings of any sorts, and ensure consistency. My question is about best practices in this specific case : what are the best ways to model a consistent address database ? A country specific design/solution would be an excellent start. ANSWER : There does not seem to exist a perfect answer to this question yet, but : xAL , as suggested by Hank , is the closest thing to a global standard that popped up. It seems to be quite an overkill though, and I am not sure many people would want to implement it in their database... To start one's own design (for a specific country), Dave's link to the Universal Postal Union (UPU) site is a very good starting point. As for France, there is a norm (non official, but de facto standard) for addresses, which bears the lovely name of <a href="http://www.boutique.afnor.org/NEL5DetailNormeEnLigne.aspx?&nivCt

Tags (comma-separated) Cancel