Re: bigint integers up to 19 digits.

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 10:43 AM, Craig James <craig_james(at)emolecules(dot)com> wrote:
> Tory M Blue wrote:
>>
>> I have a column that is a bigint that needs to store integers up to 19
>> digits long. For the most part this works but we sometimes have
>> numbers that are greater than 9223372036854775807.
>> ...
>> I was thinking of changing this to a real or double precision field,
>> but read in the docs that the value stored is not always the value
>> inserted...
>
> They're actually less precise than the same size of integer.  Real/double
> datatypes trade more range for less precision in the same number of bytes.
>
>> My number will always be 19 digits long and always an integer.
>> I looked into the numeric data type, but the docs say that it can be slow.
>
> If it's *always* going to be 19 digits, couldn't you make it a text or char
> field?  You didn't say if this is really a number.  Do you do arithmetic
> with it? Sort it numerically?  Or is it just a long identifier that happens
> to only used digits?

it is an identifier and is always a number and is used in grouping and
querying. I thought I would lose performance if it is text vs an
integer/double field.

Tory