unique row identifier data type exhausted . . .

It feels like there should be some *really* obvious answer to this
question, and I'll find myself whacking my forehead in self-abasement
and out of sheer relief to have found the answer to a problem that
should not have bothered me in the first place since the answer is too
self-evident . . . however, it is bothering me: what happens if the data
type that you've chosen to uniquely identify a row is exhausted? If, for
instance you use int4 and you've had your couple billion deletes and
inserts on the table and the next nextval('seq') . . . well, what
exactly happens and how do they do it? Admittedly, 10^9 is a big number
but it is far from out of the question that you'd reach it on a really
busy database (can't think of a real-world example but that ought to be
a moot point), not to mention oids since they are unique across an
entire database.

Cheers
Frank

--
frank joerdens

joerdens new media
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