On Oct 18, 2008, at 10:56 PM, wyerscj wrote:

> --- In baseball-databank@yahoogroups.com, "Randy Fiato"
> <sysadmin@...> wrote:
>>
>> I realize that this is a relatively minor detail in relation to
> some of the
>> other things being planned here, but I've noticed that the current
> MySQL
>> schema has several fields that are oversized. That is to say, the
> fields are
>> represented as an integer that is far too large for the possible
> range of
>> values.
>>
>> For example, in the Master table, birthYear and deathYear are both
> int(4),
>> which in MySQL is a 4-byte integer. smallint(4) unsigned (the same
> as yearID
>> in the other tables) would be better, as this uses only 2 bytes.
> Similarly,
>> the bith/death days and months could be tinyint(2) unsigned instead
> of
>> int(2).
>>
>> Another example that occurs in several tables is that games in a
> season (or
>> wins, losses, etc.) can be described as tinyint(3) unsigned (range
> of 0 -
>> 255) instead of smallint(3). I don't think MLB is going to start
> playing
>> 250-game seasons any time soon. :-)
>>
>> I've made these changes, among several others, to my copy and have
> been able
>> to shrink the size of the database by at least a couple of
> megabytes (not
>> sure of the exact amount).
>>
>> --
>> Randy Fiato
>> System Administrator, Big League Forums
> <http://www.bigleagueforums.net/>
>
> And to think this is the source of most of my problems. (Well, no,
> but I'm trying to add dramatic flair.)
>
> The problem I'm running into is that, to use these values for a lot
> of purposes I have to recast them as signed variables. I really
> couldn't find any other discussion on these issues - would it be
> really inconvenient to change the schema to not use unsigned
> variables?

If the nature of the data is that it is unsigned, it should be stored
in an unsigned column. If the nature of your application is that you
use the values in a signed way, *your application* should make the
necessary adjustments.

Otherwise, why should the next person not come along and say, my
purposes require the values to be floats, can the schema be changed to
make them floats?