Why MySQL’s (SQL) DATETIME can and should be avoided

SQL DATETIME sucks
MySQL, among other databases, has a column type called DATETIME. Its name seems to mislead people into thinking that it’s suitable for storing time of events. Or suitable for anything.
This is a general SQL thing, by the way, but I’ll demonstrate it on MySQL.
I often find this column type in other people’s database [...]

Posted Under: MySQL, Software
This post was written by eli on March 15, 2009 Comments (21)

BLOB, TEXT, and case sensitivity: MySQL won’t treat them the same

When I first discovered that there is both BLOB and TEXT in databases, I was puzzled. They occupy the same amount of disk space, and the database doesn’t alter the data itself anyhow. Why two?
Of course, I followed the stream, and went for TEXT and VARCHAR for everything, since I don’t store binary data in [...]

Posted Under: Linux, MySQL, Software
This post was written by eli on March 2, 2009 Comments (1)