Brooke Bryan – Make Life Easy, Automate Everything

In short, it really doesn’t matter.  After watching a MySQL web conference by Jay Pipes, I was gutted when I found out that they are actually exactly the same.  I know im not alone in thinking that it affected the size of the data field.  An unsigned int has the max value of 4294967295 no matter if its INT(1) or int(10) and will use 4 bytes of data.

So, what does the number in the brackets mean?  It pretty much comes down to display, its called the display-width.  The display width is a number from 1 to 255. You can set the display width if you want all of your integer values to “appear”.  If you enable zerofill on the row, the field will have a default value of 0 for int(1) and 0000000000 for int(10).

There are 5 main numeric data types, and you should choose each one on its own merits.   Based on the data you expect (or in some cases hope) to hold, you should use the correct data type.  If you dont ever expect to use a value of above 127 and below -128, you should use a tinyint.  This will only use 1 byte of data, which may not seem like much of a difference between the 4 used by an int, but as soon as you start to store more and more data, the effect on speed and space will be noticable.

Anyway, I thought I should share my new found knowledge of the display width with everyone, because it will save me thinking its optimising stuff changing from 10 to 5, haha.

1. Roel says:

   November 26, 2008 at 9:49 am

   Just what I was looking for. Thanks for the clear explanation!
2. Jasper says:

   January 30, 2009 at 10:37 pm

   I never knew that! Every day’s a school day!
3. tom3k says:

   May 6, 2009 at 5:53 am

   brilliant!

   i was always under the assumption that this affected the data inside the column in some way!

   thank you kindly for the clear and precise description!
4. thomas says:

   September 8, 2009 at 9:54 am

   thanks for the information!
   haven’t knew it yet, but is pretty nice to know
5. ayumilove says:

   September 17, 2009 at 3:24 am

   thanks for the explanation!
6. Kyle says:

   December 23, 2009 at 11:23 pm

   Cool post. Google’d what int(10) meant and found your post right away. Thanks for ur knowledge
7. Jamal Olugosch says:

   December 27, 2009 at 12:29 pm

   I suspected as such, thanks for clearly defining it for me.
8. Ronak says:

   January 23, 2010 at 5:53 am

   Thanks, new thing for me as i was in wrong assumption about INT(4) and INT(10)

   Thanks buddy…!!
9. ravichandran says:

   March 8, 2010 at 12:46 pm

   thanks for the display width info..
10. kanya says:

    March 8, 2010 at 1:01 pm

    Many thanks for your clear explanation..