A retailer is designing an inventory table that stores the number of each product sold at the close of every business day. The column will only hold whole numbers, and the application needs to add and subtract these values without risking rounding errors. Which column data type should the developer choose to ensure efficient integer arithmetic and avoid floating-point precision problems?
INTEGER (or INT) stores whole numbers exactly, making it the most efficient and reliable choice for daily product counts and other quantity fields that never require fractions. FLOAT represents numbers approximately and can introduce rounding errors. CHAR is a fixed-length text type that stores characters rather than performing numeric calculations. DATE is reserved for calendar values, not arithmetic on quantities.
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