Question

I need to store postal addresses for my users, but I don’t plan on really doing much with these addresses other than displaying it (won’t be searching users by location or anything). In this scenario, is it ok to just have an addresses table which holds an address id, user id, and one text field where users can enter in the data anyway they want? Thx for your time!

Answer 1

Sure, it’s ok to use a single column to store an entire address, as long as all these criteria apply to you and your app.

1. You don’t care what users put in
   there. (Some wiseass will surely put
   “Cthulhu and I had some good
   times”.)
2. Your app doesn’t try to take apart
   the values in that column. (In
   relational terms, the dbms is either
   supposed to ignore internal
   structure in a column or provide
   functions to manipulate that
   structure. Internal structure here
   might include street name, city,
   state, ZIP code, and so on.
   Functions include things like the functions SQL dbms provide to take
   apart dates and timestamps.)
3. You won’t select or sort by
   part of the column. (This is
   essentially the same thing as number
   2, above.)
4. You can afford the significant cost
   (in both money and time) of fixing all that data should your
   app require it later.