Re: Newbie question about BIGINT and INT in the same table
From: Lyle H. Gray <lylefitzw_at_no.spam.gmail.com.invalid>
Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2019 10:47:22 -0500
Message-ID: <XnsAAF577EE1F85Fgraynoibisspamcsumas_at_216.166.97.131>
>>
>> Ok, now I understood, I could use for the age also VARCHAR(3) because
>> it means I can insert in a row till three numbers (I know VARCHAR is
>> for string but I could use also to insert numbers!) but the column's
>> value is "infinity" so I could have a column of millions and millions
>> of values but these values are till three items!
>>
>> The mistake was to think to the columns and not to the value of the
>> row!
>>
>> Thanks!
>> ^Bart
Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2019 10:47:22 -0500
Message-ID: <XnsAAF577EE1F85Fgraynoibisspamcsumas_at_216.166.97.131>
[Quoted] [Quoted] Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex_at_attglobal.net> wrote in news:qp4bqs$q6t$1_at_jstuckle.eternal-september.org:
> On 10/27/2019 6:09 AM, ^Bart wrote: >>> You use the size of variable you need. if the values in the age >>> column are really going to exceed the time to the heat death of the >>> universe, use a bigint
>>
>> Ok, now I understood, I could use for the age also VARCHAR(3) because
>> it means I can insert in a row till three numbers (I know VARCHAR is
>> for string but I could use also to insert numbers!) but the column's
>> value is "infinity" so I could have a column of millions and millions
>> of values but these values are till three items!
>>
>> The mistake was to think to the columns and not to the value of the
>> row!
>>
>> Thanks!
>> ^Bart
> > You do NOT want to store numeric data as strings. For one thing, > sorting will be crap. '2' will be larger than '15'.
[Quoted] [Quoted] Agreed. If you want to limit the value size with a length, rather a specification of storage used (e.g. as TINYINT, SMALLINT, INT, BIGINT), then use a fixed decimal datatype (NUMERIC() for whole numbers, DECIMAL() otherwise).
If you _do_ use VARCHAR() for storage of numbers that you want to be able to sort on, you would need to have leading zeroes (e.g. '002' instead of '2'). That's usually adding complexity that you don't need. Received on Sun Oct 27 2019 - 16:47:22 CET