<p>I see that within MySQL there are <code>Cast()</code> and <code>Convert()</code> functions to create integers from values, but is there any way to check to see if a value is an integer?  Something like <code>is_int()</code> in PHP is what I am looking for.</p>

Match it against a regular expression.
c.f.
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?60,1907,38488#msg-38488
as quoted below:
Re: IsNumeric() clause in MySQL??
Posted by: kevinclark ()
Date: August 08, 2005 01:01PM
I agree. Here is a function I created for MySQL 5:
```
```
CREATE FUNCTION IsNumeric (sIn varchar(1024)) RETURNS tinyint
RETURN sIn REGEXP '^(-|\\+){0,1}([0-9]+\\.[0-9]*|[0-9]*\\.[0-9]+|[0-9]+)$';
```
```
This allows for an optional plus/minus sign at the beginning, one optional decimal point, and the rest numeric digits.