Question

I have to store about 10 int, is it better to use 10 int columns or a only varchar column whit values splitted by a character?

I’ll never need to index these columns, or to do mathematical operations.

An exemple of datas could be:

In a row of a thread ( of a forum )
Number of comments | Number of votes | Number of partecipants

These are datas that need only to be cached, not to be updated frequently.

Answer 1

I would use separated ints. Few reasons for this:

• It’s probably more clean solution
• Gives you flexibility to add indexes later if needed
• You can sort by them
• no need to split them for the actual use

More insight in your problem would be necessary to provide some more sophisticated answer.

Edit: Don’t believe you will save space. INT is 4 bytes always, number as varchar takes 1 byte for each digit + the delimiter. So if you store number greater than 999 you will actually loose space.