no, they are looking ok to me. ISO-3166-1 is for countries. But level 3 needs additional ISO-Codes ISO3166-2, i think. i’ll check that at the ISO webpage.
One of the basic issues here is the question: ‘What is a country ?’. The UN (or at least it’s statistical department) defines it differently as others. The UN wants a country in principle to have a permanent representation at the UN. ISO is more relaxed and pragmatical. However, in the Kingdom of the Netherlands (the level 2 thus) there are 4 separate countries (on level 3 thus) where 1 of these takes care of all foreign business on behalf of all 4. That makes Aruba, Curacao and St. Maarten not really totally a country according to UN norms, with the result that those 3 have both a separate 3166 code (like ‘AW’ for Aruba) AND a (another) 3166-2 code, like ‘NL-AW’. Confused ? You would be right. Sag mal: would this be causing the postal code problems ?
That Bonaire, Saba and St. Eustatius as sub-entity of Nederland have a common separate country code ‘BQ’ is not logical at all - certainly not from UN point-of-view. But they may have been needed for another reason: those islands have the USD as official currency, and otherwise (being level 2 -labelled as ‘NL’) a lot of computer systems might have assumed they would use EUR which could cause issues in banking and payment systems (this is a true story, actually).
I’m fully willing to clean-up my country (administratively); but only after consulting the NL user forum.
We tend to be finished within the day (the exception being last year when we didn’t realize that there had been a last minute change), but there are no guarantees.
Auf die Idee, mit start_date und end_date zu arbeiten, seid ihr natürlich nicht gekommen. Nun denn, selbst gemachter Stress am Neujahrstag hat ja auch was.