Get postal codes for all countries

For more international use, one schema to consider is the one used by Drupal Address Field. It's based on the xNAL standard, and seems to cover most international cases. A bit of digging into that module will reveal some nice pearls for interpreting and validating addresses internationally. It also has a nice set of administrative areas ( province, state, oblast, etc ) with ISO codes.

Here's the gist of the schema, copied from the module page:

country => Country (always required, 2 character ISO code)
name_line => Full name (default name entry)
first_name => First name
last_name => Last name
organisation_name => Company
administrative_area => State / Province / Region (ISO code when available)
sub_administrative_area => County / District (unused)
locality => City / Town
dependent_locality => Dependent locality (unused)
postal_code => Postal code / ZIP Code
thoroughfare => Street address
premise => Apartment, Suite, Box number, etc.
sub_premise => Sub premise (unused)

A lessons I've learned:

• Don't store anything numerically.
• Store country and administrative area as ISO codes where possible.
• When you don't know, be lax about requiring fields. Some country may not use fields you take for granted, even basic things like locality & thoroughfare.

After some additional searching (new search terms inspired by gbn's answer and u07ch's comment on KMike's answer) I found this, which completed successfully in 2 seconds:

ALTER DATABASE <dbname> SET OFFLINE WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE

(Update)

When this still fails with the following error, you can fix it as inspired by this blog post:

ALTER DATABASE failed because a lock could not be placed on database 'dbname' Try again later.

you can run the following command to find out who is keeping a lock on your database:

EXEC sp_who2

And use whatever SPID you find in the following command:

KILL <SPID>

Then run the ALTER DATABASE command again. It should now work.