Question

i am using a simple database design and i think the best database example is e-commerce, because it does have a lot of problems, and its familiar to cms.

USERS TABLE
UID              |int               | PK NN UN AI 
username         |varchar(45)       | UQ INDEX 
password         |varchar(100)      | 100 varchar for $6$rounds=5000$ crypt php sha512
name             |varchar(100)      | 45 for first name 45 for last 10 for spaces
gender           |bit               | UN ,0 for women 1 for men, lol.
phone            |varchar(30)       | see [2] 
email            |varchar(255)      | see RFC 5322 [1]
verified         |tinyint           | UN INDEX 
timezone         |tinyint           | -128 to 127 just engough for +7 -7 or -11 +11 UTC
timeregister     |int               | 31052010112030 for 31-05-2010 11:20:30 
timeactive       |int               | 01062010110020 for 1-06-2010 11:00:20

COMPANY TABLE
CID              |int               | PK NN UN AI
name             |varchar(45)       |
address          |varchar(100)      | not quite sure about 100.
email            |varchar(255)      | see users.email, this is for the offcial email
phone            |varchar(30)       | see users.phone
link             |varchar(255)      | for www.website.com/companylink 255 is good.
imagelogo        |varchar(255)      | for the retrieving image logo & storing 
imagelogosmall   |varchar(255)      | not quite good nameing huh? let see the comments
yahoo            |varchar(100)      | dont know
linkin           |varchar(100)      | dont know
twitter          |varchar(100)      | twitter have 100 max username? is that true?
description      |TEXT              | or varchar[30000] for company descriptions
shoutout         |varchar(140)      | status that companies can have.
verified         |tinyint           | UN INDEX 

PRODUCT TABLE
PID              |int               | PK NN UN AI
CID              |int               | from who?santa? FK: company.cid cascade delete
name             |varchar(100)      | longest productname maybe hahaha.
description      |TEXT              | still confused useing varchar[30000]
imagelarge       |varchar(255)      | for the retrieving product image & storing 
imagesmall       |varchar(255)      | for the retrieving small product image & storing 
tag              |varchar(45)       | for tagging like stackoverflow ( index )
price            |decimal(11,2)     | thats in Zimbabwe dollar.

1. see Using a regular expression to validate an email address
2. see What's the longest possible worldwide phone number I should consider in SQL varchar(length) for phone

why innodb specific ?
please see quote How to choose optimized datatypes for columns [innodb specific]?

its getting of the topic so i have to create another question and it people doent understand what im trying to say, or maybe i cant explain what i want there . this time its + database design.

so again please copy the example above and put your changes + comments just like the example. give an advice about it.

Remember for INNODB mysql. read the quote on above link. thanks.

Answer 1

I’m going to answer this as if you’re asking for advice on column definitions. I will not copy and paste your tables, because that’s completely silly.

• Don’t store dates and times as integers. Use a DATETIME column instead.
• Keep in mind that MySQL stores DATETIMEs as GMT, but presents them in whatever timezone it’s been configured to use. It may be worth setting the connection time zone to GMT so that your separate time zone storage will work.
• Keep in mind that not all time zones are full hour offsets from GMT. Daylight Saving Time can throw a monkey wrench in hour-based calculations as well. You may want to store the time zone string (i.e. “America/Los_Angeles”) and figure out the proper offset at runtime.
• You do not need to specify a character count for integer columns.
• Don’t be afraid of TEXT columns. You have a lot of VARCHAR(255)s for data that can easily be longer than 255 characters, like a URL.

Keep in mind that optimizing for a specific database engine, or optimizing for storage on disk is the very last thing you should do. Make your column definitions fit the data. Premature optimization is one of the many roots of all evil in this world. Don’t worry about tinyint vs smallint vs int vs bigint, or char vs varchar vs text vs bigtext. It won’t matter for you 95% of the time as long as the data fits.