Built in Column Types

VARCHAR and VARBINARY

A VARCHAR or VARBINARY type is used to store variable length data. Indexes on these types are by default the full length of the data stored. The only difference between the two types is the COLLATION which is used. VARBINARY uses a binary collation for all index usage. VARCHAR can only contain valid UTF-8 characters. If you need to store ASCII values the VARBINARY type.

TEXT and BLOB

A TEXT or BLOB type is used to store data which is over XXX in size. Indexes on these types must specificy the number of character or bytes which should be used. The only difference between the two types is the COLLATION which is used. A BLOB usees a binary collation for all index usage. A TEXT column can only contain valid UTF-8 characters.

NUMERICAL

BIGINT and INTEGER exist as Drizzle’s two integer numerical types. BIGINT is a 64 bit integer while INTEGER is a 32 bit integer. Declaring a numerical types as UNSIGNED causes the value to be 64 bit.

DOUBLE is the systems native double type.

DECIMAL is a fixed precision number.

TEMPORAL

DATETIME

TIMESTAMP

DATE

TIME

TIMESTAMP can be supplied an optional parameter of (6) during creation. This causes microseconds to be recorded as well. The TIME type represents duration of an event in seconds.

ENUM

Enum (enumerated) types are static lists of strings that are defineed on table creation. They can be used to represent a collection of string types that are sorted based on the order that they are created.

SERIAL

A SERIAL is a meta type that creates a column where a number is inserted in increasing order as rows are inserted into the table. The actual type is a BIGINT.

IPV6

IPV6 is a special column type that allows you to insert and query both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in their human readable presentation forms (e.g. 127.0.0.1 and ::1 respectively) but stores them as binary 128 bit values. For example usage, see:

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