Our main database in my division contains about 150,000 users total - from across the world. Although the distribution is heavily weighted towards North America and Europe, we do have a fair amount of Asian schools, and one from Brazil. Many of these schools also have international students. I hope some insights on these data may prove valuable.
We currently have fields for first name (max length=50), last name (max length=50), and full name (max length=100). These are in SQL Server (we are converting to PostgreSQL, one step at a time) and of type NVARCHAR, so that's inclusive of byte length for Unicode characters. Even with our single Brazilian school, I can see the need for a last name field longer than 50 characters, and definitely longer than 30. We also have quite a few users who have chosen to populate their last name fields with input like 'Lastname (Sr John Huntsman Prof of Awesomeness)' in their last name field, where they've abbreviated due to the field length. Yes, that would be more appropriate for a title field, but I suspect we are not alone in having users exhibit / want this flexible behavior, so it appears everywhere their name does. My two cents? Setting username, first_name, and last_name in Django to a max_length of ~192 would cover the most users, be backwards compatible even with MySQL < 5.0.3, and give a lot of flexibility to the developer. It is quite possible I've missed something, but figured I'd throw some observations based on our users out there. Thanks for the discussion. Regards, Tim -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to django-developers@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/django-developers. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/5bdcc162-fb9a-4f3f-afc7-2d4129667f8e%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
