asterisk users - Mar 2006 - Realtime Extensions hint priority

The instructions on the wiki for asterisk Realtime give the extensions 
schema with the priority field set to be tinyint(4).  This of course 
cannot hold the value 'hint'

The question I have, is the solution simply to set the field to 
varchar(n) as that will then hold 'hint' or any integer value (if you 
make it big enough) ?

Or is there any known places in the realtime integration where the code 
expects that field to actually be an integer type field.

Thanks for any help.

- Kevin