

One of the columns - description - is a text field. The following query returns information about a particular film in the MySQL Sakila Sample Database.

One useful application of the CAST() function is to make a very large data type less unwieldy (more wieldy?). You can cast data into BINARY, CHAR, DATE, DATETIME, TIME, DECIMAL, SIGNED, UNSIGNED data types.
#Mysql data types how to#
In today's blog, we'll learn how to employ both functions using examples to illustrate their usage. In MySQL, we can convert between data types using the CAST() and CONVERT() functions. In relational databases, reasons for converting one data type to another include porting data from one database type to another, changing the data type of a column, or temporarily switching between data types for evaluation. As such, they often need to be converted into a more appropriate data type, such as a number, date, or what-have-you.

Serializing data in order to send it across the network tends to coerce all variables into strings. Off the top of my head, a common use case is to process variables that were passed in from a web form via a query parameter or POST request body. Data Type Conversion in MySQL 8 by Robert GravelleĪny time that you categorize data into different types, the need to convert from one data type to another is inevitable.
