Question: “When I use procedure analyse() on my schema it suggests TINYINT for the columns which have the data type VARCHAR. Based on the performance and data requirements, which one is better?”

Answer: TINYTEXT and TINYINT and VARCHAR are quite different. For reference I would refer you to the mysql manual page about data types.

However, procedure analyse() will read the values you have in your columns and if they consistently fit a pattern that would be better suited to another data type then it will suggest the correct one. As in, if your column is VARCHAR(1) and your data is similar to “1,4,7,5,2″ etc then TINYINT would be a better suited data type since you are dealing with numbers and not variable characters. Similarly, if you have the same varchar column, but your data is “a,b,t,h,o” etc then TINYTEXT or CHAR would be better …

Ok, here’s your chance to make a recommendation on the front page layout for relationalnews.com , the new website that features news for all of the major relational database systems. Check out the three options below and leave a comment or email me with your own solution. If selected you will be credited one the site for your influence. 

The question is: we’re getting just over 1000 new articles per week from the feeds, and the current front page displays the title and summary of the latest 10 articles. This means lots of pagination clicking to see even the approximate 150 new articles for the current day. 

Option 1: display only the headlines, no article summaries, for the past 24 hours with links to the full article from the archive. Sorted by published date, limited to the past 24 hours …