Unsigned field in Amazon Redshift?

Question

I was looking for a way to create a table with unsigned integer (I know I will have only positive integers, so why not to increase the range twofold). To create an integer field, I do:

create table funny_table(
    my_field bigint
);

So I thought that using my_field bigint unsigned will solve my problem, but syntax error tells me otherwise. Looking though the documentation tells nothing about unsigned integers. Is it even possible?

Answer 1

Unfortunately Amazon Redshift doesn't support unsigned integer. As a workaround, we are using numeric(20,0) for bigint unsigned data. Here is an example.

create table funny_table(
    my_field numeric(20, 0)
);
insert into funny_table values ( 18446744073709551614 );
select * from funny_table;
       my_field
----------------------
 18446744073709551614
(1 row)

See here for the details of Numeric type.