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Data Types

31 July, 2015 - 17:41

When defining the fields in a database table, we must give each field a data type. For example, the field Birth Year is a year, so it will be a number, while First Name will be text. Most modern databases allow for several different data types to be stored. Some of the more common data types are listed here:

  • Text: for storing non-numeric data that is brief, generally under 256 characters. The database designer can identify the maximum length of the text.
  • Number: for storing numbers. There are usually a few different number types that can be selected, depending on how large the largest number will be.
  • Yes/No: a special form of the number data type that is (usually) one byte long, with a 0 for “No” or “False” and a 1 for “Yes” or “True”.
  • Date/Time: a special form of the number data type that can be interpreted as a number or a time.
  • Currency: a special form of the number data type that formats all values with a currency indicator and two decimal places.
  • Paragraph Text: this data type allows for text longer than 256 characters.
  • Object: this data type allows for the storage of data that cannot be entered via keyboard, such as an image or a music file.

There are two important reasons that we must properly define the data type of a field. First, a data type tells the database what functions can be performed with the data. For example, if we wish to perform mathematical functions with one of the fields, we must be sure to tell the database that the field is a number data type. So if we have, say, a field storing birth year, we can subtract the number stored in that field from the current year to get age.

The second important reason to define data type is so that the proper amount of storage space is allocated for our data. For example, if the First Name field is defined as a text(50) data type, this means fifty characters are allocated for each first name we want to store. However, even if the first name is only five characters long, fifty characters (bytes) will be allocated. While this may not seem like a big deal, if our table ends up holding 50,000 names, we are allocating 50 * 50,000 = 2,500,000 bytes for storage of these values. It may be prudent to reduce the size of the field so we do not waste storage space.