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Common MySQL fields and their appropriate data types

Asked 2008-12-10T00:48:19.730
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I am setting up a very small MySQL database that stores, first name, last name, email and phone number and am struggling to find the 'perfect' datatype for each field. I know there is no such thing as a perfect answer, but there must be some sort of common convention for commonly used fields such as these. For instance, I have determined that an unformatted US phone number is too big to be stored as an unsigned int, it must be at least a bigint.

Because I am sure other people would probably find this useful, I dont want to restrict my question to just the fields I mentioned above.

What datatypes are appropriate for common database fields? Fields like phone number, email and address?

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Here are some common datatypes I use (I am not much of a pro though):

| Column           | Data type     | Note
| ---------------- | ------------- | -------------------------------------
| id               | INTEGER       | AUTO_INCREMENT, UNSIGNED                                                          |  
| uuid             | CHAR(36)      | or CHAR(16) binary                                                                |  
| title            | VARCHAR(255)  |                                                                                   |  
| full name        | VARCHAR(70)   |                                                                                   |  
| gender           | TINYINT       | UNSIGNED                                                                          |  
| description      | TINYTEXT      | often may not be enough, use TEXT 
                                     instead          
| post body        | TEXT          |                                                                                   |  
| email            | VARCHAR(255)  |                                                                                   |  
| url              | VARCHAR(2083) | MySQL version < 5.0.3 - use TEXT                                                  |  
| salt             | CHAR(x)       | randomly generated string, usually of 
                                     fixed length (x)    
| digest (md5)     | CHAR(32)      |                                                                                   |  
| phone number     | VARCHAR(20)   |                                                                                   |  
| US zip code      | CHAR(5)       | Use CHAR(10) if you store extended 
                                     codes      
| US/Canada p.code | CHAR(6)       |                                                                                   |  
| file path        | VARCHAR(255)  |
answered 2009-12-28T23:40:58.780

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