List of standard lengths for database fields

Question

I'm designing a database table and once again asking myself the same stupid question: How long should the firstname field be?

Does anyone have a list of reasonable lengths for the most common fields, such as first name, last name, and email address?

Answer 1

I just queried my database with millions of customers in the USA.

• The maximum first name length was 46. I go with 50. (Of course, only 500 of those were over 25, and they were all cases where data imports resulted in extra junk winding up in that field.)

• Last name was similar to first name.

• Email addresses maxed out at 62 characters. Most of the longer ones were actually lists of email addresses separated by semicolons.

• Street address maxes out at 95 characters. The long ones were all valid.

• Max city length was 35.

This should be a decent statistical spread for people in the US. If you have localization to consider, the numbers could vary significantly.