Meh.  Depends who your client is.  WidgetCo needs a CRUD app?  Sure, their &quot;serial #&quot; field ought to be TEXT; their definition of &quot;number&quot; probably already includes &quot;0001234-45-X&quot; and is going to change in a month.<p>EmbeddedNetworkApplianceInc needs a database to manage their mission-critical data path?  That IPv4 mask length field is going to be INTEGER NOT NULL CHECK (masklen BETWEEN 0 AND 32) and they can ALTER TABLE when they need to support IPv6 and the rest of their software is ready to support a masklen of 128 without crashing.  There&#x27;s no reason to let extraneous half-baked crap get into that field.