Question

I need to create a data transfer object, which I will use for storing the records retrieved from database. In this data transfer object, I need to declare a numeric field. For that which one is better – int or Integer

If I am defining the field as Integer, will there be any performance impact because of ‘Integer’ type if I am going to retrieve more than 2000 records from DB!?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Integer is a better option, as it can handle null; for int, null would become 0, silently, if resultSet.getInt(..) is used. Otherwise, it might throw some exception, something like, ‘Unable to set null to a primitive property’.

Performance is of little concern here.

• if you choose int, you will end-up adding extra handling code; and that wouldn’t benefit you much. Your code will not be clean and straight-forward, lot of boiler-plate code, and you wouldn’t even gain performance.
• let me make it clear, for databases, null is not same as zero. Sometimes you end-up entering 0, where null was intended. Imagine the case where user submitted a form, and doesn’t supply any value for int. You will end up getting 0 by default. It makes sense, or does that really, when that field is not null in the database.