Database theory

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One of the principles of relational database design is that the fields of data tables should reflect a
single characteristic of the table's subject, which means that they should not contain concatenated
strings. When concatenation is desired in a report, it should be provided at the time of running the
report. For example, to display the physical address of a certain customer, the data might include
building number, street name, building sub-unit number, city name, state/province name, postal
code, and country name, e.g., "123 Fake St Apt 4, Boulder, CO 80302, USA", which combines seven
fields. However, the customers data table should not use one field to store that concatenated
string; rather, the concatenation of the seven fields should happen upon running the report. The
reason for such principles is that without them, the entry and updating of large volumes of data
becomes error-prone and labor-intensive. Separately entering the city, state, ZIP code, and nation
allows data-entry validation (such as detecting an invalid state abbreviation). Then those separate
items can be used for sorting or indexing the records, such as all with "Boulder" as the city name.

Recreational mathematics

In recreational mathematics, many problems concern the properties of numbers under

concatenation of their numerals in some base. Examples include home primes (primes obtained by
repeatedly factoring the increasing concatenation of prime factors of a given number),
Smarandache–Wellin numbers (the concatenations of the first prime numbers), and the
Champernowne and Copeland–Erdős constants (the real numbers formed by the decimal
representations of the positive integers and the prime numbers, respectively).