I think this would be a good improvement, and I'd like to see it. I've been
bitten by integers overflowing at least twice I can remember in my career,
which is two times too many.
However, a major thing we'd have to work out is the upgrade path Consider a
simple model:
class Person(Model):
name = CharField()
In Django 1.11, this actually generates a model with an integer `id` field.
But in we change it, in Django vNext, that `id` field would "turn into" a
bigint magically without the underlying table changes. That'd be confusing:
you'd expect the model to be "fixed" by pugrading to vNext, but it wouldn't
be. I think the migrations engine would detect this as a migration (?), so
perhaps that's the path forward, but it could still be super-confusing.
We've never shipped a release of Django that required a migration to _all_
your models.
Have you thought about what the upgrade path should look like, Kenneth?
Jacob
On Fri, Jun 9, 2017 at 11:24 AM, Kenneth Reitz <kenn...@heroku.com> wrote:
> 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
>
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