Common MySQL fields and their appropriate data types

Question

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 k

Answer 1

In my experience, first name/last name fields should be at least 48 characters -- there are names from some countries such as Malaysia or India that are very long in their full form.

Phone numbers and postcodes you should always treat as text, not numbers. The normal reason given is that there are postcodes that begin with 0, and in some countries, phone numbers can also begin with 0. But the real reason is that they aren't numbers -- they're identifiers that happen to be made up of numerical digits (and that's ignoring countries like Canada that have letters in their postcodes). So store them in a text field.

In MySQL you can use VARCHAR fields for this type of information. Whilst it sounds lazy, it means you don't have to be too concerned about the right minimum size.