So first of all everyone has read "falsehoods programmers believe about names". And of course everyone knows we should just use "name" and that's it. Perhaps a

So first of all everyone has read "falsehoods programmers believe about names". And of course everyone knows we should just use "name" and that's it. Perhaps a greeting/displayname if we need to do "Hello $customer" in an email. But still. There are often hard requirements that are impossible to reconcile with the "just store one name" idea. As an example: you need to produce alphabetically sorted lists. It would rarely be acceptable to produce lists of people sorted by their given names in Western Europe for example. So as an example if you really do need to have BOTH "Doe, John" and "John Doe" what do you do in case you know at least 99% of users will have names following this format? Do you force people to enter their name twice? In that situation I would: - Store it as a single name column, with more columns as required (greeting, sortable, ). - Present a UX that is appropriate for the region of 99% users. So for western Europe show a "first name", "last name", but don't store that: just set the name column to "$firstname $lastname" and the index name column to "$lastname, $firstname" and greeting to "$firstname" for example. That way I at least let 99% of your users only input the name once. - But (and this is important) offer an alternative way of specifying it for those who don't have a name that conforms to the format. You let just that small fraction of users enter a name/indexname/greeting instead. And yes: the above ONLY applies if it's really a hard requirement to separate them, because the last name sorting was really a requirement. Of course there are other requirements that force other solutions. The "just one input" is the correct solution for all the cases where it is possible.