MySQL Column Type Question

[ghjr]

Just a quick question. I was looking through the WordPress (blog platform) database structure and was curious about something: for the user table, the id column is bigint(20) and for the post table, the associated user id column is int(4).

I was just wondering if the two columns are different types for a specific reason, since it seems they hold the same info?

Cheers!

[subwayman]

BIGINT allows VERY BIG numbers so bigint(20) can be an integer of up to 20 digits. int(4) is an integer with a maximum of 4 digits.

[ghjr]

Thanks subwayman, but would there be any reason to specify different column types for columns that apparently hold the same information (as in the example I stated above)?

Cheers!

[bastien]

Acutually thats BYTES, an int(4) can hold 4 bytes or a number up to just over 4 billion...the number in brackets just refers to the number of digits to display

from the manual wrote:

M indicates the maximum display width. The maximum legal display width is 255. Display width is unrelated to the storage size or range of values a type can contain, as described in Section 11.2, “Numeric Types”.

In answer to the OPs original question....they should be the same, poor db design management