> Larry, would elaborate a bit on "the separate table > method"?
In Duey's original example, Title is a column that specifies the honorific to be applied to the person's name (Mr., Ms., Mrs., etc). He wants to display Male next to those names that have a 'Male' honorific and 'Female' next to the names with a female honorific. This is a typical look up table or PK/FK situation if all possible honorifics can be known (such as Rabbi, Sir, etc). So it seems to me the cleanest implementation, instead of doing the look up in a pseudo-Case statement built into a function in a SELECT statement, would be to put the information in a separate table and look it up by joining that table with the query in question: CREATE TABLE TitleLookups ( + Title CHAR(8), + Gender CHAR(6), + ) SELECT MyQuery.*, TitleLookups.Gender + FROM MyQuery RIGHT OUTER JOIN TitleLookups + ON MyQuery.Title = TitleLookups.Title (You need to do the outer join if you are going to allow Titles in the underlying table that are not in the TitleLookups table. Otherwise you can use an inner join). I like this solution better because: - It uses the database to a database lookup function. - It allows the addition of new titles with their associate gender information without having to change the program code. - It provides a single centralized source of gender information so that there cannot be discrepancies or omissions in reportng gender in different parts of the program. -- Larry __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com ================================================ TO SEE MESSAGE POSTING GUIDELINES: Send a plain text email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] In the message body, put just two words: INTRO rbase-l ================================================ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send a plain text email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] In the message body, put just two words: UNSUBSCRIBE rbase-l ================================================ TO SEARCH ARCHIVES: http://www.mail-archive.com/rbase-l%40sonetmail.com/
