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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T16:17:56+00:00

I have an application where the database back-end has around 15 lookup tables. For

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I have an application where the database back-end has around 15 lookup tables. For instance there is a table for Counties like this:

CountyID(PK)    County
49001       Beaver  
49005       Cache   
49007       Carbon  
49009       Daggett 
49011       Davis   
49015       Emery   
49029       Morgan  
49031       Piute   
49033       Rich    
49035       Salt Lake   
49037       San Juan    
49041       Sevier  
49043       Summit  
49045       Tooele  
49049       Utah    
49051       Wasatch 
49057       Weber

The UI for this app has a number of combo boxes in various places for these lookup tables, and my client has asked that the boxes list in this case:

CountyID(PK)    County
49035       Salt Lake
49049       Utah
49011       Davis
49057       Weber
49045       Tooele      
'The Rest Alphabetically

The best plan I have for accomplishing this is to add a column to each lookup table for SortOrder(numeric). I had a colleague tell me he thought that would cause the tables to violate 3rd-Normal-Form, but I think the sort order still depends on the key and only the key (even though the rest of the list is alphabetical).

Is adding the SortOrder column the best way to do this, or is there a better way I am just not seeing?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I agree with @cletus that a sort order column is a good way to go and it does not violate 3NF (because, as you said, the sort order column entries are functionally dependent on the candidate keys of the table).

    I’m not sure I agree that alphanumeric is better than numeric. In the specific case of counties, there are seldom new ones created. But there is no requirement that the numbers assigned are sequential; you can allocate them with numbers that are a multiple of a hundred, for example, leaving ample room for insertions.

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