Storing Billing address and Shipping address

[MikeMCSD]

Hi,
Does anyone have any suggestions on how I should store a Shipping address? Most of the time the Billing address is used for the Shipping address.
Should I add more fields in the Customer table like, shipAddress, shipCity, etc... or store the Shipping address in the Orders table?
Thanks

 

[LV]

I would add three more tables:
1. AddressType - contains fields: AddressTypeId as primary key and Descriptions (i.e. 1-Billing, 2-Shipping)
2. Address - contains fields: AddressId, AddressTypeId as a forein key from AddressType table and other specific to Address fields.
2. CustomerAddress - an intermediate table between Customer and Address tables, contains two foreign key fields: CustomerId from Customer table and AddressId from Address table.

Thsi way you can store as many biling and/or shipping addresses as you need for a customer.

 

[chiph]

Like LV says.

Don't forget to use a character field for postal code. Not all countries use a numeric value like the US does (Canada, for example, follows the UK style of mixed letters & numbers).

Chip H.


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[MikeMCSD]

Thanks LV and Chip, . . .
It is an excellent solution but might be overkill for me.
I'm guessing only about 10% of customers will want to change the shipping address (from their billing address).
My main concern was to not make the customer database table
too big because it might hurt performance. I was thinking of storing it in the Orders table, but that might not be too good either.