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
withthe   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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