Integer out of range in PostgreSQL database

Question

I'm trying to save a number representing the length of a file (4825733517). The column is set to type integer. I don't have any validations or restrictions set.

RangeError: 4825733517 is out of range for ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::PostgreSQL::OID::Integer with limit 4

Should I be using some other column type for this value? (on rails 4.2.4)

Answer 1

For columns of type integer, the :limit value is the maximum column length in bytes (documentation).

With 4 byte length, the largest signed integer you can store is 2,147,483,647, way smaller than your value of 4,825,733,517. You can increase the byte limit, for example to 8 bytes to be a long integer (a bigint PostgreSQL type), this will allow you to store signed values up to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807.

You can do this with a migration create it with something like rails generate migration change_integer_limit_in_your_table, and the following code:

class ChangeIntegerLimitInYourTable < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    change_column :your_table, :your_column, :integer, limit: 8
  end 
end

Answer 2

According to the PostgreSQL documentation an integer have a range from -2147483648 to +2147483647. So your number is to big for this type.

Update your column and use the parameter limit to indicate that you want to have a bigint.

change_column :table, :column, :integer, limit: 8