On 25 Oct 2007, at 10:32, Doug Chamberlin wrote:

> Have you considered using varchar(10) for United States postal code
> values
> ("zipcodes")? I would recommend thinking of these values as
> character data
> even though the values are often numeric.

This is a customer's data, so at a fundamental level, I have to just
deal with it. Tableau is a general purpose data visualisation tool
and I don't have any domain knowledge aside from the fact that it is
a join column and it contains real data. So when I import it into
Firebird, this is all I can know.

The real problem is that Excel is not a database and the typing is
inferred by the JET engine. And if JET sees a column of all [0-9]*(\.
[0-9])*, it is going to type it as a real. The only way to get it to
do anything different might be for the user to have a zip+4 table
with dashes in it. We could infer that the reals are really integers
if we run an analysis query that shows this (and we would know to run
such a query because we know that Excel has this limitation) but that
is about it.
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Richard Wesley Senior Software Developer Tableau
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