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(tye)Re: SSN's possible new Y2K problem?

by tye (Sage)
on Aug 13, 2002 at 19:05 UTC ( [id://189920]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to SSN's possible new Y2K problem?

Personally, I don't consider it good design to have a field named "SSN". Have a field for "Identifier" or even "ID Number" and make it varchar(30). Don't you want your clients to ever have non-U.S.A. customers? Don't you ever want to have clients from other than the U.S.A.?

For example, I live in the U.S.A. but my insurance company does not even know what my SSN is nor the SSNs of any of my family members. I do this for philosophical reasons but also because it greatly reduces how many forms and people end up with my SSN, which I feel reduces my risk of becoming a victim of identity theft.

My ID number for insurance is assigned by the insurance company and starts with an "N", not a digit (though it is only 9 characters long).

I pick 30 for the length because I remember when New York did something rather stupid. They changed their drivers' license numbers to be an encoding of identifying characteristics plus a sequence number (the first digit designated your eye color, etc.). That resulted in a 21-character driver's license number. This turned out to be very inconvenient for my employer who was selling software with a 20-character field for ID Number (which was rather larger than required by the drivers' license numbers of any state prior).

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

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Re: (tye)Re: SSN's possible new Y2K problem?
by ichimunki (Priest) on Aug 14, 2002 at 16:42 UTC
    I want to chirp up and agree with tye, but add that it might be a good idea to have an ID type column as well, with values like "SSN", "TIN", "Dummy", etc-- that way if you ever need to you can key on the combination of the two fields, rather than the single ID number (since they recycle SSN you might have cause to label one "Expired SSN"). Also, I wouldn't worry too much about the length, because a good database should make it possible to enlarge the field size without changing any existing data.

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