Madhivanan and Jason bring up some good points. Formating! Then if you like LIKE you'll love this. Try a search argument with an embedded RegEx. Search for '*e*' and stand by for a boat load of rows.

I'm pushing to store phone numbers as BigInt. I don't have to dial the dashes why should I have to store them? Oh, and three fields too. Country code, area code, phone number. OK, I know that there are letter on the phone but the phone system could care less.

I have customers that use ISO 8601 dates (20081202 for today). Goes in a char(8). On one hand no messy times. 🙂 A ship date is a ship date. On the other try doing calculations by week. 🙁 I plan on finding a real good reason for these folks to migrate from 2000 to 2008. The date type has me all a twitter.