I literally always have to look up the meaning of :limit in migrations when it comes to integer values. Here’s an overview. Now let’s memorise it (oh, this works for MySQL, other databases may work differently):
:limit | Numeric Type | Column Size | Max value |
---|---|---|---|
1 | tinyint | 1 byte | 127 |
2 | smallint | 2 bytes | 32767 |
3 | mediumint | 3 byte | 8388607 |
nil, 4, 11 | int(11) | 4 byte | 2147483647 |
5..8 | bigint | 8 byte | 9223372036854775807 |
Note: by default MySQL uses signed integers and Rails has no way (that I know of) to change this behaviour. Subsequently, the max. values noted are for signed integers.