Django BigInteger auto-increment field as primary key?

Question

Hi all,

I'm currently building a project which involves a lot of collective intelligence. Every user visiting the web site gets created a unique profile and their data is later used to calculate best matches for themselves and other users.

By default, Django creates an INT(11) id field to handle models primary keys. I'm concerned with this being overflown very quickly (i.e. ~2.4b devices visiting the page without prior cookie set up). How can I change it to be represented as BIGINT in MySQL and long() inside Django itself?

I've found I could do the following (http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/fields/#bigintegerfield):

class MyProfile(models.Model):
    id = BigIntegerField(primary_key=True)

But is there a way to make it autoincrement, like usual id fields? Additionally, can I make it unsigned so that I get more space to fill in?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You could alter the table afterwards. That may be a better solution.

Answer 2

I also had the same problem. Looks like there is no support for BigInteger auto fields in django.

I've tried to create some custom field BigIntegerAutoField but I faced a problem with south migration system (south couldn't create sequence for my field).

After giving a try couple of different approaches I decided to follow Matthew's advice and do alter table (e.g. ALTER TABLE table_name ALTER COLUMN id TYPE bigint; in postgre)

Would be great to have solution supported by django (like built in BigIntegerAutoField) and south.