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I'm designing a database table and once again asking myself the same stupid question: How long should the firstname field be?
Does anyone have a list of reasonable lengths for the most common fields, such as first name, last name, and email address?
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For number fields, the field size determines exactly how much disk space Access uses for each value of the field. For text fields, the field size determines the maximum amount of disk space that Access allows for each value of the field.
For database fields, VARCHAR(255) is a safe default choice, unless you can actually come up with a good reason to use something else. For typical web applications, performance won't be a problem.
Field Limits People will run into the following character limits when they fill out an Address field: Street Address: 255 characters. Address Line 2: 150 characters. City: 255 characters.
Field Names can only be a max of 255 characters.
I just queried my database with millions of customers in the USA.
The maximum first name length was 46. I go with 50. (Of course, only 500 of those were over 25, and they were all cases where data imports resulted in extra junk winding up in that field.)
Last name was similar to first name.
Email addresses maxed out at 62 characters. Most of the longer ones were actually lists of email addresses separated by semicolons.
Street address maxes out at 95 characters. The long ones were all valid.
Max city length was 35.
This should be a decent statistical spread for people in the US. If you have localization to consider, the numbers could vary significantly.
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