Is there an actual advantage to using a numeric field over text beyond rejecting alpha characters?

[Rob Horan]

Not a sarcastic question, I was asked this question by a client - the client is unhappy with how their data is presented (with commas, leading zeros removed) and the lack of contains search options.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Numeric fields sort correctly as well (a list of 1, 4, 11 will sort in that order if it is a number, but 1, 11, 4 if it is text)

I don't think there's anything you can do about the leading 0s, but in look and feel, you can tell it not to render thousand/million/billion separators.

However, from the question, it's clear that your people should be using string fields, as they're expecting the data to behave as a string.  I'd swap to string fields and then tell them not to enter them incorrectly (or possibly validate)

[Craig Castle-Mead]

While I don’t know the full ins and outs of lucene performance between string and numeric fields, I feel like there’s a chance that a numeric field is more efficient to store/search a value than a string field with numbers in it (anyone able to confirm or deny)?

on top of that (and the answers above) though, from a functional point of view, if you may want to do range based queries on the values, a numeric will be better.

CCM

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It sounds like your instinct is that numeric fields are computationally faster than text.  You are right.  A numeric field is faster than a text field for almost all operations.

But a little bit of performance is nothing to worry about when you're looking at a field, you should go with what gets your people the answers they want.  I would much rather get "right answer in 10 seconds" than "possibly a right answer, but we're not sure, in 8 seconds"

[Ismael Jimoh · Accepted solution]

Hi @Rob Horan 

No there is no advantage past that. If however you are doing any fancy scripting though then I would suggest using the number field because your text field is usually converted to String rather than a number and you then need to convert again to number, hoping that the entry is valid.

Cheers.

[Rob Horan]

Thanks!