title: Drawbacks of storing an integer as a string in a database
body: <p>I have id values for products that I need store. Right now they are all integers, but I'm not sure if the data provider in the future will introduce letters or symbols into that mix, so I'm debating whether to store it now as integer or string.</p>
  
  <p>Are there performance or other disadvantages to saving the values as strings?</p>