Today at 11:01am, Sasha Pachev said: >If you are a storing timestamps, you should use MySQL timestamp type, and >definitely not a varchar, as it would just waste space. Timestamps are >stored as efficiently as they could possibly be - a 4-byte integer,
I don't mean to nit pick too much, but while that may be the most efficient way "in general", for timestamps measured in seconds covering a span of about 68 years. But IIRC, something was mentioned about them simply being times, all within a single day. if that's the case, there's only 86,400 seconds to worry about, rather than a few billion, which can be stored in 17 bits instead of 32. Mysql's time type (as opposed to timestamp or datetime) might be a better fit in this particular case. If only minutes are needed, rather than seconds, then you've only got 1440 values, and can do it in 11 bits, or 2-byte int, or a 4-byte char[], or whatever. On a side note, space isn't the only consideration when deciding what format to use. If you're storing it in a format that you'll have to convert most of the time before you can use it, then you're trading the space you save for the computation time it costs to do the conversions. On a busy web server, for instance, that may not be the way you want to make the tradeoff. Granted, in this case, the difference might look pretty small, but if you multiply it by thousands or millions of times you'll have to convert it, the time savings may be more important than the space savings. Mac -- Mac Newbold MNE - Mac Newbold Enterprises, LLC [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.macnewbold.com/ ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
