MySQL 8 Query Performance Tuning: A Systematic Method for Improving Execution Speeds

© Jesper Wisborg Krogh 2020

J. W. KroghMySQL 8 Query Performance Tuninghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5584-1_13

13. Data Types

Jesper Wisborg Krogh¹ 

(1)

Hornsby, NSW, Australia

 

When you create a table in MySQL (and other relational databases), you specify the data type for each column. Why not just store everything as strings? After all, when the number 42 is used in this book, it is represented as a string, so why not just use strings for everything and allow all kinds of values for every column? There is some merit to that idea. This is partly how NoSQL databases work (though there is more to it than that), and the author of this book has seen tables with all columns defined as varchar(255) strings. Why bother with integers, decimals, floats, ...