> At the end of the day this thing is something that a human will read and map to the real world location. That is quite an assumption. I personally would use

> At the end of the day this thing is something that a human will read and map to the real world location. That is quite an assumption. I personally would use a field with a structured format e.g. XML (most RDBMS systems can deal with XML easily) and different types of address field e.g. postcode, zip code etc. Then you could use a strategy for each country when dealing with it in your application.