Re: Dumb question about serial's upper limit

--- Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> CSN <cool_screen_name90001(at)yahoo(dot)com> writes:
> > If integer's range is -2147483648 to +2147483647,
> why
> > is serial's range only 1 to 2147483647 instead of
> 1 to
> > about 4294967294?
>
> How are you going to stuff 4294967294 into an
> integer field, which as
> you just stated has an upper limit of 2147483647?
>
> If we had an unsigned int type, we could use it for
> serial and get
> that result, but we do not.
>
> regards, tom lane
>

I was thinking about the types in the C code behind
PostgreSQL, rather than types in PG itself. Been a
long time since I coded in C but I thought it had
unsigned ints and maybe data types could be mapped as
so (pardon my ignorance about C/PG's inner workings):

PG int => C signed int
PG serial => C unsigned int

Anyhow, was just something I was curious about.

CSN

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