Specifying a Data Type
From InterBase
Go Up to Developing a Set of Rules (Designing Databases)
Once you have chosen a given attribute as a column in the table, you must choose a data type for the attribute. The data type defines the set of valid data that the column can contain. The data type also determines which operations can be performed on the data, and defines the disk space requirements for each data item.
The general categories of SQL data types include:
- Character data types.
- Whole number (integer) data types.
- Fixed and floating decimal data types.
- Data types for dates and times.
- A Blob data type to represent data of unspecified length and structure, such as graphics and digitized voice; blobs can be numeric, text, or binary.
For more information about data types supported by InterBase, see Specifying Data Types.