Phil, After spending a lot of time researching this subject and I have concluded that there is no simple rule governing the allocation of postcodes. While "postcode clustering" is quite common, there are also many exceptions. So you shouldn't ascribe logic to the way Australia Post operates. Your solution will need to be based on a lookup table between regions and postcodes, not on rules.
Besides, how do you plan to define "regions". Assuming you mean a geographical area smaller than a state but larger than a suburb, there are actually several official and unofficial demarcations, or you can invent your own. Every major government department has its own regional demarcation, eg. federal electorate, state electorate, tourism region, roads authority region, police regions, etc. In a tourism-related project we've done, we used tourism regions, which is an official definition that is surprisingly quite consistent. I haven't been able to find a mapping of postcodes to tourism regions, but you can get pictorial maps of tourism regions for each state from the Bureau of Statistics (http://www.abs.gov.au). May take a bit of searching. Let me know if you can't find it and I may be able to dig up the links for you. It's a lot of manual effort to assign thousands of postcodes to these regions. You'll have to overlay the region map on the postcode map and key it in. We avoided this problem by just displaying the maps and allowing tourism operators to nominate themselves to the region they serve by just clicking on the picture. Maybe you can do something similar and let your users do the hard work for you? Phil Rasmussen wrote: > > I am just fancying up our database, and have decided to implement a region > feature for suburbs. Initially I was just going to create another table for > regions, add all the regions in, and then associate a region to a suburb. Ie > Regions would be..Gold Coast, Brisbane, Sunshine Coast, Cairns, Sydney... > > This however involves human intervention in going though every suburb and > selecting the region its in, plus its a little clumsy. I figured that since > the postcodes are already stored for every suburb, that I should create > another table which contains all postcodes and the region they belong to. > That way all suburbs will automatically be able to find what region they are > in through a simple JOIN in the query. > > Then I got to thinking 1 step further, and maybe I should store a rule for > each region. Ie, all postcodes that start with 40-- would be Brisbane, and > so on for all regions. > > Anyone have something similar setup whereby they deduce regions from > postcodes? > > Thanks, > > Phil > > --- > Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. > Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). > Version: 6.0.449 / Virus Database: 251 - Release Date: 29/01/2003 > > --- > You are currently subscribed to cfaussie as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > MX Downunder AsiaPac DevCon - http://mxdu.com/ -- Regards: Ayudh +--------------------------------------------------------------+ | Turn on your Revenue Stream... | | Bolt on a Virtual Cash Register to your e-commerce site now. | | VeriPay from Xilo Online: http://www.xilo.com | +--------------------------------------------------------------+ --- You are currently subscribed to cfaussie as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] MX Downunder AsiaPac DevCon - http://mxdu.com/
