Common MySQL fields and their appropriate data types

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.


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)  |                                                                                   |  
| 5-star rating    | DECIMAL(3,2)  | UNSIGNED                                                                          |  
| price            | DECIMAL(10,2) | UNSIGNED                                                                          |  
| date (creation)  | DATE/DATETIME | usually displayed as initial date of 
                                     a post                                       |  
| date (tracking)  | TIMESTAMP     | can be used for tracking changes in a 
                                     post                                        |  
| tags, categories | TINYTEXT      | comma separated values *                                                          |  
| status           | TINYINT(1)    | 1 – published, 0 – unpublished, … You 
                                     can also use ENUM for human-readable 
                                     values
| json data        | JSON          | or LONGTEXT