preferBigInt

Diagnostic Category: lint/safety/preferBigInt

Since: vnext

Sources: - Inspired from: squawk/prefer-big-int

Description

Prefer BIGINT over smaller integer types.

Using smaller integer types like SMALLINT, INTEGER, or their aliases can lead to overflow issues as your application grows. BIGINT provides a much larger range and helps avoid future migration issues when values exceed the limits of smaller types.

The storage difference between INTEGER (4 bytes) and BIGINT (8 bytes) is minimal on modern systems, while the cost of migrating to a larger type later can be significant.

Examples

Invalid

CREATE TABLE users (
    id integer
);

code-block.sql:1:1 lint/safety/preferBigInt ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

  ! Using smaller integer types can lead to overflow issues.

  > 1 │ CREATE TABLE users (
      │ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  > 2 │     id integer
  > 3 │ );
      │ ^^
    4 │ 

  i The 'int4' type has a limited range that may be exceeded as your data grows.

  i Consider using BIGINT for integer columns to avoid future migration issues.

CREATE TABLE users (
    id serial
);

code-block.sql:1:1 lint/safety/preferBigInt ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

  ! Using smaller integer types can lead to overflow issues.

  > 1 │ CREATE TABLE users (
      │ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  > 2 │     id serial
  > 3 │ );
      │ ^^
    4 │ 

  i The 'serial' type has a limited range that may be exceeded as your data grows.

  i Consider using BIGINT for integer columns to avoid future migration issues.

Valid

CREATE TABLE users (
    id bigint
);

CREATE TABLE users (
    id bigserial
);

How to configure

{
  "linter": {
    "rules": {
      "safety": {
        "preferBigInt": "error"
      }
    }
  }
}