General talk about software patterns

["Sean Muir" <sean.muir AT ams.com>]

Hello Everyone,

      I have ran into a similar issue accross several systems and have not
seen a very good solution.  The problem arises when the system needs to
capture and persist invalid data for further processing.  For instance,  we
receive data to represent a date that is actualy the address.  The system
needs to respond with the original data and the format error at some point
in the future (Hence the persistance).  The two solutions i have seen is

      1) Support a "shadow"  or  "staging" table of string types and
migrate information to actual tables after information is validated.
      2) Do not support "types" in the data model and represent everything
as string and use software to support db constraints and db types.


      Both solutions add some level of complexity to the system by needing
to know what table and state the data is in before processing.
Any other suggestions or approaches would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Sean Muir
.