Re: updating integer column

True comments, all - and we haven't even gotten into the problem of telephone
extensions. But the original question was about 10 digit numbers so I assumed
vanilla US area+prefix+number.

Cheers,
Steve

On Monday 24 February 2003 11:33 am, scott.marlowe wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Steve Crawford wrote:
> > > > oh and what is the best datatype to use for a 10 digit phone number?.
> >
> > -snip-
> >
> > > Secondly, for a phone number, ask yourself how you're going to treat
> > > it. Are you going to do a sum() across the numbers?  Or maybe multiply
> > > them together?
> > >
> > > If yes, then you should store them as some kind of numeric, int, or as
> > > a float.
> > >
> > > If, however, the numbers are not going to be used for math but for
> > > identification, then it is likely that a text / varchar type would be a
> > > better choice.
> >
> > Don't use int:
> > create table foo (ph int);
> > insert into foo values (5105551212);
> > ERROR:  dtoi4: integer out of range
> >
> > Use char(10).
>
> Actually, I'd use text or something, because I store international
> and US phone numbers.  Some are easily 15 or more characters long.
>
> > Better yet, "properly" normalize phone numbers into area-code (char(3)),
> > prefix (char(3)) and number (char(4)) fields. This way you can
> > error-check your phones against the area-code table, determine
> > approximate geographical areas/time-zones, flag dangerous numbers (very
> > high cost off-shore versions of 900/976 numbers that look like ordinary
> > phone numbers), etc.
>
> Yes, but then absolutely nothing but US phone numbers will fit.  While
> that's a great idea if all you're storing are US numbers, it doesn't fit
> all models.  I don't think it's possible to come up with a regex that
> will qualify all the goofy phone numbers my company's database stores.
>
> > If you really want to you can even include a prefix table to do the same
> > thing at the exchange level using NANPA data.
>
> We actually do something similar.  On campus we have 4 digit numbers, but
> we have four different prefixes depending on range.  i.e. prefix 123 is
> used for say 0001 through 2999, while prefix 456 is used on 3000 through
> 4499, then 879 for 4500 through 7999 and so on.  So we join them based on
> range.  Works pretty well, but it's ugly.
>
>
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