Magento Create Product Attribute That Is An Integer

[typeman]

So apparently the support you get from Varien when you purchase the Enterprise Edition is next to worthless so I am hoping that someone here can maybe lead me in the right direction.In Magento I am would like to create a product attribute that is the type int. When I create the attribute from the admin panel it creates it as a varchar.What I am ultimately trying to do is create a total sold attribute so that I can use it for sorting by most sold products in the category display. The problem with it being varchar is that when you sort by this, it sorts it as a string and not a number. Varien told me that in order to get this to be an integer I would have to do an update to the database. It looks like to me that I would have to change the backend_type column in the eav_attribute table to int and that should hopefully move the values to catalog_product_entity_int table instead of it going to catalog_product_entity_varchar table. Does this make sense? Has anyone else done this before?Now that I have that question out there, is this what I should expect from the support from Varien? So far their support seem pretty useless. It seems that asking how to do something this simple would not be a big deal (especially since I asked them how to do it, and not to do it for me)