Dear Django Dev,
At Heroku, we have the privilege of seeing an extremely broad range of customers utilizing tools like Django to build their applications and companies. One of the things that we’ve seen customers hit, time and time again when using tools like Django, is integer overflows for primary keys. Their application starts behaving unpredictably once they reach the overflow, not even knowing such a constraint exists, and they often think the problem is with their database provider, rather than with their schema. Once they realize what is wrong, it’s a relatively trivial fix, but a migration can take several hours to complete, which results in unacceptable amounts of downtime. Because of this, Heroku, as a company, would like to encourage bigints as a sane reasonable default for primary keys for application models. If the Django project agrees with this idea, that would mean that Django would provide BigAutoField as the default for ‘id’ instead of AutoField. Rails made this change recently <http://www.mccartie.com/2016/12/05/rails-5.1.html>, and has seen success in doing so. I’m happy to provide the code to do this, but I wanted to discuss it here before doing so, to hear what the general consensus was to the proposal of such a change. Pros: - Users of Django, following the docs, won’t accidentally hit the int overflow barrier. - Encourages best-practices from the beginning. - Bigints don’t take up much more storage than ints when using Postgres. - In-line with other frameworks moving forward on this issue, like Rails <http://www.mccartie.com/2016/12/05/rails-5.1.html>. Cons: - Backwards compatibility would need to be considered. Why not UUID? I agree! I love using UUID for my primary keys, and I think a patch to Django which provides an AutoUUIDField would be wonderful. However, there are a few major drawbacks to making this the new default: 1. It’s confusing to new users, would make onboarding process more difficult. 2. UUID is difficult to implement in MySQL. 3. UUID has larger storage requirements. 4. Incrementing IDs are actually useful. So, my proposal is to simply lift the int barrier to a bigint barrier for new Django applications, and I think it will save a lot of developers a lot of pain in the long run. Many thanks, Kenneth Reitz Heroku Python -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to django-developers@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/django-developers. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/6fe3401c-4404-4bd8-9d22-58df95cd1348%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.