integer - Whats the size of an SQL Int(N)?

Question

Simple question. I have tried searching on Google and after about 6 searches, I figured it would be faster here.

How big is an int in SQL?

-- table creation statement.
intcolumn INT(N) NOT NULL,
-- more table creation statement.

How big is that INT(N) element? What's its range? Is it 2^N or is it N Bytes long? (2 ^ 8N)? Or even something else I have no idea about?

Answer 1

It depends on the database. MySQL has an extension where INT(N) means an INT with a display width of 4 decimal digits. This information is maintained in the metadata.

The INT itself is still 4 bytes, and values 10000 and greater can be stored (and probably displayed, but this depends how the application uses the result set).