Question

I am developing a web application using PHP and MySQL. I want to know that is there any way to save Data as Small as Possible in MySQL?

Answer 1

Here are the lengths of date types in MySQL, choose whichever fits your needs. You can save 1 more byte by defining the column as NOT NULL.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/storage-requirements.html says:

Storage Requirements for Date and Time Types
Data Type   Storage Required
DATE        3 bytes
TIME        3 bytes
DATETIME    8 bytes
TIMESTAMP   4 bytes
YEAR        1 byte

If your MySQL engine is up-to-date enough, you might want to check out InnoDB’s row compression (which might make database operations slower though):

• http://dev.mysql.com/doc/innodb/1.1/en/innodb-row-format-dynamic.html
• http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/innodb-compression-usage.html