I'm working on a voicemail application which involves storing phone numbers and other types that have long sequences of digits [0-9]. I need to be able to do pattern matching using LIKE and map the fields back to java String objects. I was thinking maybe it would be more efficient to use the numeric(x,0) type instead of a varchar since it could use less space on disk. My calculations for disk space based off some information i found online are ( 8 + ( 2 bytes for every four digits) ) for numeric and ( 4 + number of chars ) for a utf8 varchar datatype. Are these calculations still valid and has anyone tried using numeric for this purpose or is this really stupid? Thanks for any hints! Gene
