When it comes to declaring and manipulating integers,Oracle offers lots of options,including:
INTEGER – defined in the STANDARD package as a subtype of NUMBER,this datatype is implemented in a completely platform-independent fashion,which means that anything you do with NUMBER or INTEGER variables should work the same regardless of the hardware on which the database is installed.
BINARY_INTEGER – defined in the STANDARD package as a subtype of INTEGER,variables declared as BINARY_INTEGER can be assigned values between -231 .. 231,aka -2,147,483,647 to 2,647. Prior to Oracle9i Database Release 2,BINARY_INTEGER was the only indexing datatype allowed for associative arrays (aka,index-by tables),as in: