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Software Engineering vocabulary · Databases and Persistence

Data type

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounCore term

In software engineering, data type means: The kind of value a column can hold, such as whole numbers, text, dates or true/false values. It controls what can be stored and how much space it takes.

In Turkish: veri tipi, veri türü

How it is used

Chosen when you create or alter a column: INT, BIGINT, VARCHAR(255), TEXT, DATE, TIMESTAMP, BOOLEAN, DECIMAL(10,2). A wrong data type causes bugs and slow queries, for example storing dates as text or money as FLOAT. Names differ slightly between products.

Example sentences

  1. Use DECIMAL, not FLOAT, as the data type for prices.

  2. Changing the data type of a column on a table this big will lock it for a while.

Common collocations

  • choose a data type
  • change the data type
  • data type mismatch
  • numeric data type
  • columnA vertical part of a table with a name and a data type, holding one kind of information for every row, such as email or created_at.
  • CREATE TABLEThe SQL statement that makes a new table, defining its name, its columns with their data types and its constraints such as the primary key.
  • ALTER TABLEThe SQL statement that changes the structure of an existing table, for example to add, rename or drop a column or to add a constraint.
  • NULLA special marker meaning that a value is missing or unknown. It is not the same as zero or an empty string.
  • default valueThe value a column gets automatically when a new row is inserted without a value for that column, such as 0, 'pending' or the current time.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Databases and Persistence

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