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> Certainly not for account numbers, social security numbers, credit card numbers, confirmation numbers, and others. Those are not numbers. Those are opaque id
by sebazzz 8y ago
> Certainly not for account numbers, social security numbers, credit card numbers, confirmation numbers, and others.
Those are not numbers. Those are opaque identifiers which just happen to take a form of a number. My DBA teacher always said: If you don't need to calculate it, then don't process and store it as a number. This applies to phone numbers as well.
- adrr 8y agoStrings take so much more space than a number. This is why you store IPV5 as numbers and not strings unless you want a very large table.
- thomasedwards 8y agoWhat happens when you convert 00000456 to an integer? Strings are safer, which is more important than space.
- tbyehl 8y agoAn IP address is actually a number that math may be performed upon.