Question

I setup a database/website recently where the members have points scored against them.

There are 3 points fields (corresponding to different activities). And the Sum of those 3 fields = their total points.

Initially, I understood they’d always be whole numbers not totally more than 30. So I set the point fields to INT

Now they need to be able to have quarter (.25) and half points (.5) assigned.

Am I best to change these points fields to FLOAT(2,2)?

Answer 1

I would use a DECIMAL(4,2). 4 is the precision (the total number of digits); 2 is the scale (the number of digits to the right of the decimal point).

From the MySQL Reference:

Fixed-Point (Exact-Value) Types

The DECIMAL and NUMERIC types store exact numeric data values. These types are used when it is important to preserve exact precision, for example with monetary data. In MySQL, NUMERIC is implemented as DECIMAL, so the following remarks about DECIMAL apply equally to NUMERIC.

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Alternately, you could just store an int that represents 4 times the “actual” score.
Example: 4.25 would be represented in the database as 17.