Alan,

I'd be willing to bet that 99.999% of all apps developed by US companies have a State table populated with US states and some fraction of them include Canadian Provinces and some fraction contain the Mexico states etc. 99.999% of all apps developed by Canadian companies have a Province table populated with the Candian provinces, some fraction contain the US states and some contain the Mexican states. The Swiss developers name that table Canton and so on.

Bad name for a table? I don't believe so. There is no generic name for sub-geopolitical units of a country. In the context of code readability to the people that read it the most having a table named state (or province ( or canton ) ) makes the most sense. Do you have to make a mental translation if you read my database code or I yours? Yup, but it's a very minor one.

>And there is the key. So far I haven't seen anything here that suggests the actual purpose that Michel's tables are supposed to serve. Without knowing exactly what the two tables are supposed to be used for, it's difficult to say whether or not they need changing, or if it's just an unfortunate choice of table names.