I just really just leaving room for the idea that someday the data might consist of two digit numbers, or perhaps even more.

If you think they're going to stay within 255, you can pack them into a string, and then just store it in a char field. (not varchar -- no need for the extra overhead, as you know how many values there are going to be -- if the number of values change, you can then always alter the table

Even leaving yourself two bytes per stored value is only going to be one character more than a comma-separated string is going to be. (and if you're using a varchar, that extra character overhead is moot)

...

But that being said, there's a few other considerations that probably won't come out without benchmarking trying the single-record-per-user vs. the record-per-value approach --

And as you mention archiving -- you might want to consider that your archiving might not need to match your storage for normal use. Even if you store the data for normal use as a record per value, you can store it in a more compact format for long term archiving.

In reply to Re^2: stooping lower by jhourcle
in thread MySQL - Query vs Perl by Trihedralguy

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