I'm skeptical of using different types in a dynamically typed language (or db) as a tagged union where each type has a different meaning. IMHO youre better off

I'm skeptical of using different types in a dynamically typed language (or db) as a tagged union where each type has a different meaning. IMHO youre better off with two columns with a constraint that exactly one of them must be Null. The issue is someone at some point is going to write code reasonably assuming the value must be an integer, not a string, and when the value turns out to be a string you'll get unpredictable behavior.