Acronym

[Frank Situmorang]

Hello,

I have created my local church database and I am still developing the
database for our denomination worldwide. To enable us to consolidate the data
in the head office, I want to have the the primary key to be always unique
for member and address. My question is what is the best way to make 2-field-
primary key in
1. tblAddress: Church ID and HouseholdID
2. tblMember: ChruchID and MemberID

To make ChruchID consists of Accronym ( arbitraryly) no duplicate or just
numbers
What is the advantage of making it like California State, as CA, etc. may be
there is a certain purpose of making acronym.

Thanks for your advice

 

[John W. Vinson]

Hello,

I have created my local church database and I am still developing the
database for our denomination worldwide. To enable us to consolidate the data
in the head office, I want to have the the primary key to be always unique
for member and address. My question is what is the best way to make 2-field-
primary key in
1. tblAddress: Church ID and HouseholdID
2. tblMember: ChruchID and MemberID

To make ChruchID consists of Accronym ( arbitraryly) no duplicate or just
numbers
What is the advantage of making it like California State, as CA, etc. may be
there is a certain purpose of making acronym.

Thanks for your advice

Acronyms are (slightly) useful in helping users remember them. I would
recognize KMCC as the acronym for my church, Kirkpatrick Memorial Community
Church, a lot more easily than I would remember 3117 or some other meaningless
numeric ID.

However... they are limited. If you have 2337 acronyms to deal with, you'll
only be able to remember a few, and you won't have the benefit of them being
mnemonic. Even worse, it's hard for an acronym to be both unique *and* a good
memory aid! Suppose you have four churches - Parma First Adventist, Peoria
Faith Adventist, Pittsburg Fourth Adventist, and Pretoria Free Adventist.
Which one gets to be called PFA? What do you call the other three - PFA1,
PFA2, PFA3? If so you're back to arbitrary numbers!

Better in my opinion to have a concealed, meaningless numeric ChurchID, and
provide combo boxes and other tools so that the user can see a
human-meaningful name in full, rather than having to try to figure it out from
some cryptic combination of letters.

US state codes (and Canadian provinces for that matter) come from a small
enough "universe" of potential names that it's still reasonably easy to
memorize them, and historically the abbreviations were established before
computer lookups were widely available. Neither condition applies to the list
of all the Adventist churches in the world!