List of standard lengths for database fields

Question

I\'m designing a database table and once again asking myself the same stupid question: How long should the firstname field be?

Does anyone have a li

Answer 1

Just looking though my email archives, there are a number of pretty long "first" names (of course what is meant by first is variable by culture). One example is Krishnamurthy - which is 13 letters long. A good guess might be 20 to 25 letters based on this. Email should be much longer since you might have firstname.lastname@somedomain.com. Also, gmail and some other mail programs allow you to use firstname.lastname+sometag@somedomain.com where "sometag" is anything you want to put there so that you can use it to sort incoming emails. I frequently run into web forms that don't allow me to put in my full email address without considering any tags. So, if you need a fixed email field maybe something like 25.25+15@20.3 in characters for a total of 90 characters (if I did my math right!).