MySQL int(3) exhausted!

[subwiz]

I created a MySQL column with int(3), totally miscalculating the growth of my site. Now the colum is filling up... what will happen after the colum entry reaches 999? What is the solution?

[LordShryku]

If will start throwing you "Duplicate key for blah" records if this is a unique field.

[subwiz]

Yes, this is a key field... what is the solution? Will I be able to alter column data type from int(3) to int?

[LordShryku]

Yep. Or bigint. Check the MySQL manual for ALTER TABLE

[subwiz]

Thank u!

[ahundiak]

The addition of a length attribute to an integer field i.e.
CREATE TABLE nuns (
habits INT(3)
);
is a non-standard mysql extension to SQL.
http://www.mysql.com/documentation/mysql/bychapter/manual_Reference.html#Column_types

The 3 affects only the display width of the column and not the internal data. So storing 1000 would work just fine. You may need to tweak other parts of your code if it assumes a 3 character column but the database itself will continue to work.

And it's probably not a really good idea to use non-standard features if they can be avoided.