How to represent international phone numbers in Cloud Spanner?

[lutherrichards]

What would be the best way to represent international phone numbers in Google Cloud Spanner? I would like it to be consistent with the proto defined here.

The phone numbers we will record are of e164_number format (as in the proto) and I have tried representing  the Extension (as in the proto) as a STRING column. This is a potential fix, but I feel like there could be a more correct solution. Any help would be appreciated.

[gsuceveanu · Accepted solution]

You may consider using the JSON type in Cloud Spanner by tailoring the fields to match your requirements. The documentation page titled "Working with JSON data" has more related details. 

[lutherrichards]

Thank you for your help here. This ended up solving the problem I was facing.