Honestly, the storage use would probably be the last thing of my mind when designing for "what should state/region/district/bundesland/etc. be modelled as". Som

Honestly, the storage use would probably be the last thing of my mind when designing for "what should state/region/district/bundesland/etc. be modelled as". Sometimes those things get renamed, sometimes they are merged, and sometimes they are split. Which means that you may end up in an awkward state when e.g. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern gets split back into Mecklenburg and Western Pomerania, and some of your customers have updated their addresses, and some haven't. You have to store all of that anyway because remember: your DB doesn't represent the current state of the world, it represents your knowledge about the current state of the world (which is where the whole impetus for NULL originated: "I know that the customer has an address, I just don't know what it is", and all related problems with it: compare "I know that the customer actually does not have any address at all", and "I know that this address just can't be correct no longer but I have no new knowledge about what it can be").