I love the odd places my job takes me. Today I am building a database to house all of the "marks" we place on animals we capture. Tags, Collars, Leg Bands, RFID Tags (they're in fish and your passport), Tattoos, Radio Collars, GPS Collars, Backpacks, Wing Tags.... the list is seemingly endless. The fun thing about designing databases is figuring out ahead of time all the exceptions. For the moment at least, I now know more details about tagging animals than many field biologists. So far we have the following attributes: Tag Type Collar, Band, Round, Square Tag Location Right Leg, Left Leg, Right Wing, Left Wing, Neck, Nose, Right Ear, Left Ear Tag Construction Plastic, Metal, Leather, Ink (tattoo) Color Red, Green, Yellow, Black, White Mark R-2345, 562626849057, TIGGER, Y-7892-23 (We'll leave radio frequencies out of our discussion and focus purely on the visual aspects) The challenging part of this is deciding what to leave in, what to leave out. I can probably di...