Store IMEI in SQL Server / Azure

Question

Do you please have any idea which way should I store the IMEI? Should I store it as a bigint? or may be real or float or varchar? IMEI takes 15 characters and normally it is all numbers without any spaces or seperators.

Answer 1

Are you referring to mobile equipment #'s, as described here ? If you're going to search on partial matches of the number, you'll want to store it as some type of character representation. Any type of integer (or bigint) value is going to make things more challenging when it comes to partial-match searching. Also, if you want to verify the check digit, you need to walk through each digit in the IMEI, so again, a character representation is going to work better in this case.