title: Best practices for storing postal addresses in a database (RDBMS)?
body: <p>Are there any good references for best practices for storing postal addresses in an RDBMS?  It seems there are lots of tradeoffs that can be made and lots of pros and cons to each to be evaluated -- surely this has been done time and time again?  Maybe someone has at least written done some lessons learned somewhere?</p>
  
  <p>Examples of the tradeoffs I am talking about are storing the zipcode as an integer vs a char field, should house number be stored as a separate field or part of address line 1, should suite/apartment/etc numbers be normalized or just stored as a chunk of text in address line 2, how do you handle zip +4 (separate fields or one big field, integer vs text)? etc. </p>
  
  <p>I'm primarily concerned with U.S. addresses at this point but I imagine there are some best practices in regards to preparing yourself for the eventuality of going global as well (e.g. naming fields appropriately like region instead of state or postal code instead of zip code, etc.</p>