Question: “When I use procedure analyse() on my schema it suggests TINYINT for the columns which have the data type VARCHAR. Based on the performance and data requirements, which one is better?”
Answer: TINYTEXT and TINYINT and VARCHAR are quite different. For reference I would refer you to the mysql manual page about data types.
However, procedure analyse() will read the values you have in your columns and if they consistently fit a pattern that would be better suited to another data type then it will suggest the correct one. As in, if your column is VARCHAR(1) and your data is similar to “1,4,7,5,2″ etc then TINYINT would be a better suited data type since you are dealing with numbers and not variable characters. Similarly, if you have the same varchar column, but your data is “a,b,t,h,o” etc then TINYTEXT or CHAR would be better …
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