Silly question for the masses: Assume you have a table that handles the state of your object as it passes through your workflow.
Now assume you have a standard United States State table...
What do you call your US State table, without being redundant?
Additional Constraint - You can't pluralize your tables.
Some thoughts:
UnitedState
StateOfUnion
UnionizedState
AmericanState
Curious to see what other people come up with...
I've traditionally used USStates for this, short for "United State's States", the full version's a bit less intuitive than the short...but the short's what you're looking at all the time.
Some other examples:
AUStates - AustraliaMXStates - MexicoINStates - IndiaJust using the country prefix works, if you're storing a different set of data for each country, if you're not doing that, there's no need for multiple tables in the first place.
CountryDivision would be pretty global
CountryDivisionId
CountryId
Name ("Texas", "Ontario", ...)
and a Country table
CountryId
CountryDivisionAlias ("State", "Province", ...)
Name ("United States of America", "Canada", ..)
USAState
Or if you want to include the country in each record call it GeographicState
Why do you have to change the geographic states table. Why not name the Workflow States table WorkflowState, WorkflowObjectState, ObjectState, etc.
Also, I tend to put geographic states into in memory collections instead of the database.
I've used Regions but we were tracking more than just the names of states. We wanted the ability to breakdown or buildup other areas by geoloc such as cities, neighborhoods, businesses, etc
Provinces- This addresses both states and provinces as in some countries.