Data types - Which should i be using?

[crocough]

Hi there,

 

I'm new to both PHP and MySQL and for my first project I'm creating a wages system.  And these are the necessary fields that need to be filled.

 

1. Name,

2. Hourly rate, for e.g. 8.50 (£8.50p)

3. Deliveries (how many deliveries made, for e.g. 10)

4. Bonus (for example £20 if 10 or more deliveries are achieved)

5. Hour in (0-24)

6. Minute in (0-60)

7. Hour out (0-24)

8. Minute out (0-60)

9. Total (this will output how much money they have earned)

 

From having a glance over data types I have selected the following :

 

1. VARCHAR

2. DECIMAL

3. SMALLINT

4. SMALLINT

5. TIME

6. TIME

7. TIME

8. TIME

9. DECIMAL

 

Could anyone verify if this is anywhere close to being correct?

 

[btherl]

I wouldn't limit yourself with a smallint for the bonus, since it's a monetary value.  I can't believe there will be many rows in this table, so saving a few bytes of space is not worth sacrifing expressiveness.

 

The rest looks fine.. it's a little odd to seperate hour and minute, but you can always add them together if you want.  FYI, there are functions in mysql to extract the hour and minute part from a time value: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/date-and-time-functions.html