On Dec 15, 2008, at 11:23 AM, Thomas Briggs wrote: > I think Nathan's point is that the integer you get when declaring a > column INTEGER PRIMARY KEY can hold a 64-bit value anyway, so why > couldn't it simply be declared differently and behave the same?
INTEGER PRIMARY KEY is the exception to the rules for SQLite datatypes. Any other column can hold any datatype, regardless of the declared datatype. But an INTEGER PRIMARY KEY is different. INTEGER PRIMARY KEY is an alias for the underlying rowid. It can only hold an integer. If we allowed any integer-typed column that was a PRIMARY KEY to behave this way, then you would suddenly have many expections to the rule, rather than just one. And there would be no way to declare a column that had integer affinity that was the primary key. The INTEGER PRIMARY KEY exception was first introduced in SQLite version 2.2.0, about 7 years ago (2001-12-20). D. Richard Hipp d...@hwaci.com _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@sqlite.org http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
