I noticed in the 1.6.10 upgrade, the numvotes column was converted from smallint to text. I'm just wondering why the column is of the text datatype. That is a very inefficient way to store integers...
I still don't understand why text was chosen... The int type can hold 2,147,483,647 or 4,294,967,295 when unsigned. Nobody is ever going to reach 4.2 billion poll votes. Text datatypes are not stored with the rest of the table record. This is rather poor database design.
(2013-06-07, 03:45 PM)spork985 Wrote: [ -> ]I still don't understand why text was chosen... The int type can hold 2,147,483,647 or 4,294,967,295 when unsigned. Nobody is ever going to reach 4.2 billion poll votes. Text datatypes are not stored with the rest of the table record. This is rather poor database design.
+1. You should NEVER use text for an integer. BIGINT would have sufficed if you need bigger than an unsigned integer (which I seriously doubt for almost all forums on the platform).
Is there any intent on fixing this?
Hopefully one of the devs can respond to that. I hate the thought of integers being stored as a non int type.
I can't really comment here, but I believe it's a temporary change.