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Status Not under consideration
Workspace Informix
Components Informix Server
Created by Guest
Created on Aug 17, 2020

Improvement in the check for high serial values

I'm trying to check if a serial value has reached its upper limit. I noticed the following unpleasant behaviour.

In the sysmaster tables sysptnhdr and sysactptnhdr the currently used serial values are in three fields for the datatypes serial, serial8 and bigserial.

If my serial approaches the upper limit for integer data types, the easiest way is to change it to a serial8 or bigserial.

During the alter table, the current value from serial is now copied into the column of the new type. Unfortunately the value of serial is not reset to 0 or NULL.

This means that a value check still reports a dangerously high serial value, even though the table no longer has this data type.

Since you can have both types serial and serial8/BigSerial in a table in parallel, you must now also check the syscolumns of the affected database to suppress this message.

At least for databases with non-english locale this is even more difficult, because you cannot access directly from sysadmin or sysmaster.

My suggestion is that only the field of the data type that is used is filled with the current serial value and the others are reset to 0 or NULL.

A repro for this behaviour can be found in the support case TS002868693.

Needed by Date Sep 30, 2020
  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Sep 3, 2020

    A work around to this problem at ALTER time when changing the type of a column from, for example, SERIAL to BIGSERIAL would be to first set the next serial number to zero then alter the type to BIGSERIAL setting the next value manually as part of the alter:

    ALTER TABLE mytab MODIFY keycol SERIAL(0);
    ALTER TABLE mytab MODIFY keycol BIGSERIAL(16,010,001);

    I agree that this behavior should be automatic, especially given that a table can contain more than one serialized type as long as they are different types (ie one SERIAL, one BIGSERIAL, and one SERIAL8)!