int(11) vs. int(anything else)

Question

I\'m new to web programming and doing different tutorials that I can find on the net.

I did my research and found out that in int(11), 11 is the maximum display widt

Answer 1

I agree that the MySQL manual is a little vague on the length/display width of integers. You might think that this limits the value you can store in the column to the number of digits but the valid range of the colomn doesnt change, wether you set it to 1 or 11.

What it really does is determine the display width of the column's value. The only case this is usefull is if you use ZEROFILL to pad your values with zero's.

So basically there is no real difference between INT(1) and INT(11) in terms of what you can store in the column, the only case when it becomes relevant is when you want to ZEROFILL your values.

More info:
http://alexander.kirk.at/2007/08/24/what-does-size-in-intsize-of-mysql-mean/
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/numeric-types.html