title: Common MySQL fields and their appropriate data types
body: <p>I am setting up a very small MySQL database that stores, first name, last name, email and phone number and am struggling to find the 'perfect' datatype for each field. I know there is no such thing as a perfect answer, but there must be some sort of common convention for commonly used fields such as these. For instance, I have determined that an unformatted US phone number is too big to be stored as an unsigned int, it must be at least a bigint.</p>
  
  <p>Because I am sure other people would probably find this useful, I dont want to restrict my question to just the fields I mentioned above.</p>
  
  <p>What datatypes are appropriate for common database fields? Fields like phone number, email and address?</p>