Re: oid as long type

Kris Jurka <books@ejurka.com> writes:
> On Wed, 8 Feb 2006, Mark Lewis wrote:
>> To maintain compatibility with existing code but still give access to
>> the entire OID value space, why not map OID values >= 2**31 to negative
>> numbers-- i.e. just consider them to be signed ints?

> We don't always know when we're working with OIDs.  If someone says
> PreparedStatement.setInt() we don't know if they're passing us a mangled
> OID they got from LargeObjectManager.create or if they're just passing us
> an int, so we'd have to send the mangled form to the database.

Does that matter?  There's an implicit cast from int4 to oid on the
database side, so I am not clear where the problem really comes in.

regression=# select (-1)::int4::oid;
    oid
------------
 4294967295
(1 row)

regression=# select 4294967295::oid::int4;
 int4
------
   -1
(1 row)

            regards, tom lane