How much more load on server is "bigint" instead of "int"?

Volitics

Can anybody tell me how much more server capacity does a "bigint" column type take than an "int" column type?

The reason I ask is that I have a table that stores customer information. The customer id, which is the customer reference number, is a number that includes the year, month, and day the customer/user joins plus other digits.

The int column most likely will have enough storage capacity. But for my peace of mind I'm thinking about changing the column type from int to bigint. I'm just wondering how much more server capacity it would take in terms of storage and bandwidth.

The mysql version is: 4.0.24-max-log according to this:
$r = mysql_query('SELECT VERSION()');
$version = mysql_result($r, 0);
echo $version;

I would appreciate any information that anybody could provide.

Thanks.

bradgrafelman

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/storage-requirements.html

Volitics

bradgrafelman;

Thanks for responding.

I was looking at that section yesterday. It says that the bigint takes 4 bytes more storage capacity than the int column type. A byte is only one character.

So, if I'm reading it right, the server would have to read the equivalent of only four more characters each time a table cell with the bigint column type was accessed.

From what the MySQL manual says it looks like the bigint column type would not be that much more taxing on the server than then int column type.

I'm just trying to figure out if there is something that I'm overlooking.

jheitz

No, you're right. If the likelihood is that you'll need larger numbers in the future than INT support, go for BIGINT no doubt. Unless you are having millions of transactions per day the difference in storage and processing is not going to be massive.