[freekMEDIA]

This may seem a rather broad question, but maybe someone has a suggestion.
Being that I've been doing a bit more database work than I've ever done before, I've come across a lot of different combinations of information. Constantly trying to add fields for FirstName, LastName, City, State, Zip, etc...
I was wondering if anyone out there has ever come across (or maintains) a site with some accepted standards for field formats.
I would be particularly interested in learning possible combinations, and lengths for certain fields.
As an example:

First Name
- Char(24)

Age
- TinyInt(3) (I think that's right...? Of course I wouldn't actually use age, I would use birth day and then calculate the age, but you get the idea...)

The main thing I'm stuck on with this, is I'm not sure about formatting things like international phone numbers vs. U.S. phone numbers, postal codes vs. zip codes, and how long to make each field, or what data type to use (I'm still a bit of a beginner when it comes to this kind of stuff). I suppose it's just as easy to store them as strings, but I'd imagine it would be best if I filtered for proper formats to maintain consistency.

I guess with all that said, what I'm looking for is basically a source of information on how to properly format all of my fields.
Not necessarily for any particular database application, but just general guidelines.

Another thing that would be nice if someone has a source for it, would be a database (or query to create one) that has a listing of all countries in the world with their states...
heh, but maybe that's asking for a bit too much. I did however find an entire Bible separated by books, chapters and verses in an Access DB.