RalphWilson (9/1/2010)

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Some time back, I successfully made the case for an organization to have a look up table for countries & states (if the country was the US) based upon having located rows indicating Oklahoma City was in something like 30 of the 50 states and at least 15 foreign countries. (I have strong reason to believe that, at the very least, "Oklahoma City, TX" was incorrect. )

rmechaber (8/31/2010)

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I just spent 2 weeks(!!) cleaning up a lookup table in a third-party ERP application that allowed (and still allows, but for the now-rescinded, application level user permissions) free-form entry for states and countries.

Fun fact: the United States of America has 786 states within its borders, including China, Formosa, Bhopal, and Chicago.

Referential Integrity??? "We don't need no stinkin' referential integrity!!!"

Rich

miki_home (9/2/2010)

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Oh I feel your pain. We have a free-form "Occupation" field on one of our main Sales applications, so I've just spent weeks building a lookup table to make some sense of the thousands of mis-spelled and misleading entries.
My particular favourites are "HR Minger" - I can only assume they meant "HR Manager", and the eighteen different spellings of the word "Childminder".