Gene schrieb:
you're probably right, actually using LIKE with numeric works fine but of course i will have to contend with things like truncating zeros to the left etc... are there any advantages to using ascii encoding as far as performance of LIKE, REGEXES, INDEXES etc versus using UTF8?
Well if you are really concerned, write a custom datatype where you store 2 digits of the telephone number in one byte. A nibble for 0-9+-/ und " " should be plenty (you would even have a c-like string end marker :-) Of course you would need to write operators for everything you want to do w/ it. IIRC, there were even plans I read on the list to write such a datatype. Maybe you scan the list archives first. Regards Tino
