A bookmark for every view of "Gangnam Style"!

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/12/gangn...

> typical database column

Typical for 70s and 80s.

Honestly, designing a 21st century database is a different thing if compared to back then.

You can use 128 bit integers, provided that you really want to use integers. And maybe you put a timestamp along.

It's kinda impressive that they got to 2 billion rows - with indexes, no less - without falling over.

>to fix it they have to migrate the entire database to use a different type for bookmark IDs... except of course this will take a while because there are two Billion Of Them Lol

You can shard them between 2 tables. Then migrate them to a single one later.

This is like seeing a brick wall 40 miles down a straight road and yet still managing to drive into it, and then blaming the wall.

Ha, a site I worked on hit this limit for the "follow relationships" table - had to build a new compound key table to migrate to, with triggers to dual read/write, to unbreak everything. In a few hours of "wtf" -> "oh crap" -> "well I guess we gotta do it right this time" and quick coding.

And then I pulled apart PT-OSC to make it more... less incredibly stupid about resource use, so it wouldn't cause too much load while it backfilled. And let it run for about 6 weeks.

Good luck! It's a fun problem to have - excess success, and a light puzzle to solve :)

For anyone who feels like looking up exactly what this bookmark was pointing to: I did, and very much wish I hadn't!

Is it faster to convert a column like this to unsigned? Obviously assuming you don't use negative IDs in the application.

That's much more of a "kick the can down the road" solution to only double your usable range, but if all positive the values in the rows shouldn't actually have to change, just the column metadata, so it could theoretically be more or less instantaneous. I guess in practice this doesn't happen; the server would rather use its generic "rebuild the table" alter method for changing a column type.

But it seems like you could reasonably do it if it's a signed-to-unsigned change and there's no negative values and there's an index on the column to make checking that fact fast. Or one of those third-party/lower-level type tools could let you do it without any checking.