Numeric types in MySQL have two varieties: - “precise” types such as INTEGER and DECIMAL; - the IEEE-standard floating point types FLOAT and DOUBLE. As a rule of thumb, the first group are for exact, “counted” quantities. The INTEGER types represent whole numbers, and DECIMAL represents “fixed point” decimal, with a preset number of places after the decimal point. Various widths of INTEGER are available in MySQL, from 8-bit TINYINT to 64-bit BIGINT. Calculations with integer types are fast, as they usually correspond to hardware register sizes. DECIMAL is commonly used for quantities like decimal currency where the number of digits of precision is known and fixed. For example, exactly counting pennies in two decimal digits. Computation with DECIMAL is slower than other types, but this is unlikely to impact most applications. In the other category are FLOAT and DOUBLE,  [Read more...]