The differences in processing efficiency between MySQL’s three character storage types should not have a big impact on processing times unless your data sets are extremely large.

MySQL offers many traditional data types, such as NUMERIC and VARCHAR, but it also includes a number of signed and unsigned numeric types (for example, TINYINT, SMALLINT, MEDIUMINT, INT and SIGINT), a ...

* Dr. Internet columnist Steve Blass discusses the differences between MySQL character data types * Help Desk columnist Ron Nutter discusses the costs of data across a WAN ...