On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 7:13 PM, David Johnston <polobo@yahoo.com> wrote:
> However, I will say again, you DO NOT WANT TO ACTUALLY DO THIS!
>
> The specific issue is that some US Postal Code begin with a zero ( 0 ) and
> so whenever you want to the zip_code value you need to pad leading zeros if
> the length is less than 5. Now consider that a full zip_code can be in 5+4
> format with an embedded hyphen and you no longer can even store it as
> numeric. If you deal with Canada (and maybe Mexico) at all then spaces and
> letters become acceptable characters within the zip_code.
David - Thank you for that great info / explanation. Very informative
and helpful. I was not required to make this change but rather just
goofing off attempting to learn SQL as I'm rather terrible at it. Can
you tell me if there's an organized cheat sheet or something
documented in regards to data types commonly used for commonly used
field association? I think that's great for people who can't look at
the documentation and clearly understand specific definitions or
assumed categorization based on the type definition.