Is it safe to ALTER columns from the USERFIELD table ?

[mihai11]

Originally Posted by Paul M

Why do you want to change it ?

On my board, I am implementing right now a system of award points and it would be nice to be able to have those points on the user list. Obviously, the points are integers so I was thinking that I should ALTER the USERFIELD table to support integers. This would help because there will be no need to convert the data from string to integer when I will perform math operations in PHP.

But, after reading the replies above, I am starting to think that it is better to save the points as a string value and when it is necessary to convert the string to an integer.

Some additional advantage would have been that it would be quite fast to find all the users with more than lets say 70 points. Maybe there are some MySql functions that allow me to convert a string to integer so that the whole operation will be performed on the MySql side. If that is true, then the only disadvantage remains speed.