Common MySQL fields and their appropriate data types

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Someone’s going to post a much better answer than this, but just wanted to make the point that personally I would never store a phone number in any kind of integer field, mainly because:

  1. You don’t need to do any kind of arithmetic with it, and
  2. Sooner or later someone’s going to try to (do something like) put brackets around their area code.

In general though, I seem to almost exclusively use:

  • INT(11) for anything that is either an ID or references another ID
  • DATETIME for time stamps
  • VARCHAR(255) for anything guaranteed to be under 255 characters (page titles, names, etc)
  • TEXT for pretty much everything else.

Of course there are exceptions, but I find that covers most eventualities.

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