Re: weird duplicate data problem

Josh Berkus wrote:
> Carolyn, Jeff,
>
> I have to disagree with this, Jeff. A six-digit integer takes up only
> 20% of the storage space of a 6-character string. As such, it will be
> faster to index and faster to retrieve, and faster to perform JOINs and
> sorts. So if Carolyn will never want to store anything but numbers in
> the field, integer is ideal.

That is all true, and still you should not restrict the
possible content to something that got nothing to do with the
nature of the data.

Things like account numbers, zip codes, phone numbers,
whatnot ARE CHARACTER SEQUENCES - period. How sure can
Carolyn be that there will never be an account number where
leading zeroes are significant? That true already for zip
codes (and by the way, european zipcodes are alphanumeric).

And what is the cosmic significance of my phone number plus
your creditcard number divided by Carolyn's shoesize? :-)

Jan

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