Address formats

[tomglare]

Would it do any harm to change "address1" on debtorsmaster and suppliers (and any other tables with the same address structure) to a TEXT field?

As "address2" is effectively already reserved for use by the postal town, "address3" for the county/state and so on, this means that all the address before the post town has to be crammed into address1, where VARCHAR(40) is patently inadequate.

Putting the local part of the address into a single field (which can included embedded newlines) also makes searching simpler when you are dealing with addresses where not all lines of the block/street/district are always included because you can run a match/partial match against a single field instead of having to check two or three different fields.