Day 5. MySQL Data Types

MySQL has the capability to store, represent, and manipulate data in many ways. In today's lesson, you will learn about MySQL's various data and column types.

In particular, today you will learn:

• The numeric data types, including INT, FLOAT, and DECIMAL

• The textual and binary data types, including CHAR, VARCHAR, TEXT, and BLOB

• Data types for handling sets of data values, ENUM and SET

• Special column attributes, such as AUTO_INCREMENT and BINARY

• How MySQL represents date and time

A good grasp of MySQL's column types is essential for later lessons in which you will create tables with columns of the types you learn here. Today's lesson gives you a clear understanding of behaviors and storage characteristics of the various column types, and, in some cases, the impact they can have on one another and on the table design as a whole.