From: "Sujay Koduri" > I guess anywhere we have 3 levels of hierarchies for a phone number. > (Country code, Area code and the actual number).
That's a pretty wild guess IMHO. You have to be absolutely sure that this is true for each and every country in the world. Furthermore, various telecom providers have short phone numbers for their own services that are only valid for their clients. If your application is to store these numbers too (e.g. a billing application) then you will have phone numbers without country and area code! > The advantage of seperating them into different columns(Either an integer or > a string) is that he can group different phone numbers based on area code or > country code. Phone numbers cannot be considered to be numbers IMHO. The customer might want to store the "name" version of a phone number (in some countries you can get phone 'numbers' in certain fictive "area codes" where the "actual number" consists of letters (e.g. 0800-mysql). If these 'numbers' are to be stored too an integer type field will not suffice. If you need to group phone numbers it will only be based on country code, country code plus area code, or country code plus area code plus a part of the actual number. So you need to group by phone number starts with. This can easily be done with a string type and an index. Using a clever and consistent format to seperate the various parts of the phone number (whole parts with leading zero's!) combined with knowledge on how to build the number to dial (drop the leading zero or not, etc.) is all you need to make an application that works in more than one country. Regards, Jigal. -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
