Re: FN-FORUM: Storing the leading 0 of product codes in MySQL

date posted 11th October 2006 14:38

Quoting Paul Cooper [EMAIL REMOVED]

> Text uses less memory than numbers.

Do you have any evidence for that? It seems unlikely.

The number 123 can be stored as a binary number (01111011) in one byte.
The string "123" needs three bytes (00111101 00111110 00111111)[1].

That's a simplification that only deals with small integers. But I'm
pretty sure that most numbers can be stored far more efficiently than
their string equivalents.

Dave...

[1] Assuming ASCII (1, 2 and 3 are characters 62, 63 and 64 respectively)

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