ktsirig

Hello all!
I have a field in my Mysql db which can store various numeric types, like 123, -45.74423, 23e-56 etc, and for those numbers, I can't know if they will be float, integers, positive or negative or how many decimal digits they may have.
My question is, should I use something like VARCHAR (100) as data type for this column?
If, in a query, I want to select all numbers that are >50 for example, will the comparison work or there will be a problem because I would have stored the numbers as VARCHAR?

Please advice!

hschmitz

In most cases the DOUBLE PRECISION data type should be enough. If I remember correctly it has up to 14 significant digits and can store numbers up to approximately 1e300. Of course you can also store integers.