How are Implicit-Heap dynamic Storage Binding and Dynamic type binding similar

I use as follows:

Plain text

For configuration - usually using YAML or .ini. Deprecated by me for most uses except when a text file is the desired result (e.g. print to text, save to text etc.)

XML

For configuration and transportation of data; e.g. export, format via XSLT etc. Good as a portable file format (e.g. SVG). Excellent manipulation tools and filters.

Databases

Main data storage from inside app/webapp. Use it all the time as storage of choice. It's reliable, robust, and you get a lot built in (transactions, referential integrity, cascading delete/update, indexes, speed). Best used with a layer, or ORM (IMO).

Single file archive (e.g. .zip)

Suitable for storing related multiple binary streams compactly, e.g. ROM images for an emulator. Best for things that don't often or never have to be updated. It is heavyweight, slow and hard to manipulate;

Binary

Only where a database is not available for storing app data. Easiest with serialization (C++). A highly tuned binary format will outperform everything else for both speed and size.

Joel Spolsky wrote an article about why Hungarian notation exists and what it was intended for that may help answer your question.

Prefixes like tbl for a database table, int for an integer etc. are generally not useful - it is trivial to work out what is what from context or from your development tools in those cases. Something like imp for imperial measurements and met for metric makes a lot more sense because otherwise you can only see that they are floating point numbers.

area = width * height

looks perfectly fine while

impArea = metWidth * impHeight

shows you straight off that something is wrong.

Personally I just use descriptive variable names. $number_of_items is obviously an integer count. $input_file_handle, $is_active and $encrypted_password have obvious types both in terms of language data type and semantic type.