[postgis-users] Possible bug in shp2psql

[chodgson@refractions.net]

Quoting Paul Ramsey <pramsey@refractions.net>:

> I dunno... bug? :) More of an interpretation thing...
> That's a 14-digit parcel number, it's not really a number, since
> numerically it has no meaning. It could be modelled just as well
> (better?) as a varchar. Probably it is declared as a number(14,0) in the
> DBF file though, so shp2pgsql tries to make it an integer. The code just
> needs another test, so that if the number of requested digits in a
> numeric field is > 9, then int8 is used instead of int4. That still will
> not save us from people who declare 100-digit strings as number(100,0)
> though.
> P.

That's what the "numeric" type is for in SQL ... if the number of digits is 
greater than 19, one could use a numeric to represent the number (effectively 
using a char) to an arbitrary number of digits.

Chris