Summary for Data Types

MySQL supports five data types categories: numeric, date and time, string, spatial, and JSON. The numeric data types can be distinguished into four categories, namely bit-value (e.g., BIT(M)), integer (e.g., INT), fixed-point (e.g., DECIMAL), and floating-point (e.g., FLOAT). For string types, MySQL provides eight distinct data types, e.g., TEXT, that serve different purposes. Likewise, there are eight data types for representing spatial data types. Simply specifying a column with the data type POINT SRID 4326 already enables the storage of a location in a geographic reference system known as WGS 84 and is commonly used in applications such as Google Maps. Lastly, MySQL complements its data types with native support for JSON, which is of particular interest due to its common usage in web development.