>Nadya,
>
>It's not unusual for address "numbers" to contain alphabetic characters. This is especially true with business in plazas.
>
>This, however, may not be strictly limited to business places, but to residential as well.
>
>Consider this true story...
>
>I've live at 7 Chestnut Street for going on 24 years. My neighbor, Gene, lives at 5 Chestnut. This past summer, Gene, who's around 70, decides that his house is too big for he and his wife to take care of properly, and decides to build a new one.
>
>He has enough land so that he can build it between his old house and mine. Fortunately, there is no 3 Chestnut, because if there had been, his old house would've become 5A Chestnut, and the new 5B.

George,

It is taken care of in our system. We have Integer Street Number and Character 4 StNumExt (street number extension). The extension could be letters and digits. The dash - is stored as part of StNumExt. If we would store street numbers as characters, we would have to reserve 5 characters, but in 90% of cases only first 4 characters would be used. That's why storing them as integers seems correct to me. In fact, it worked well over years.

So, as I said, if there is a speed problem, it may affect our queries. But I hope, that we do not use the long index expression in our queries often. Unfortunately, I do not remember now, how true it is. I'm going to write my colleague right now to check this thread.