A customer's telephone number is in the format 123-456-7890. Which of the following data types is used for the phone number?
Correct Answer: C
A telephone number, despite being composed of digits, is not used for calculations and often includes formatting characters such as hyphens (-). Therefore, the most appropriate data type for a telephone number is Text (or VARCHAR in SQL databases), which can accommodate various formats and lengths, and preserve leading zeros that might be present in some phone numbers. Storing phone numbers as numeric data types would strip away any formatting and could lead to the loss of significant leading digits (like zeros in international numbers).
Boolean is a binary data type and only represents true or false values.
Date is a data type used for dates.
Number could technically store phone numbers, but it is not suitable due to the reasons mentioned above.
Reference:
Best Practices for Storing Phone Numbers1
Data Types in SQL for Phone Numbers2