Re: duration of services datatype

[Jonathan Stephens]

The question you should ask yourself is, What sort of operations do I want to perform on this data?

In most cases, when dealing with lengths of time, you'll want to perform arithmetic operations on them. So use a numeric data type. Since duration isn't usually reckoned with negative values, I'd suggest you use SMALLINT UNSIGNED. See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/integer-types.html for the integer types supported in MySQL.

cheers,

Jon Stephens
MySQL Documentation Team @ Oracle

MySQL Dev Zone
MySQL Server Documentation
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