Oh Yeah! Friday rant to follow...
>From my experience there usually is no good reason for this sort of thing. I've seen people attempt to store phone numbers as a number and surely most here have seen similar things. >Yea the phone number thing *facepalm* >ask them how they gonna store 000 as number. >i think ive read it somewhere, a rule of thumb is if you dont need to do calculations with your "number", make it a string Several years ago we were working on a soft copy bill delivery system for one of the telcos. The specification I wrote said that the phone number was a text field with a maximum length of some large number. The vendor who wrote the analysis software for us saw NUMBER looked at a few of them and said IT MUST BE AN INTEGER! and besides integers are small and fast to process => good. When you dialled special numbers, text would be put in the field, like "000" became "Emergency Services" Or for an international number the international prefix would be replaced by a "+". They got very upset when they ran through the bulk of the test data we gave them with the specification and many of them failed! Yes I think that I agree with the comment "a rule of thumb is if you don't need to do calculations with your "number", make it a string" I may reword that as if the number is a measurement, it probably is best being a numeric, if it is a business generated identification it is probably best being a string. Have fun Greg #27
