Better int64 support

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Python integers are variable sized, for example:

>>> import sys
>>> sys.getsizeof(int(19283612873512536))
32
>>> sys.getsizeof(int(192836128735125361239862))
36
>>> sys.getsizeof(int(1928361287351253612398621293876))
40

but the current azure.data.tables entity serialization maps all python integers to int32 on Azure, which is not very friendly because you are bound to hit a nasty error at runtime when your python integer overflows int32. Then you have to monkey around the documentation and if you are lucky you discover EntityProperty(memory, EdmType.INT64) and change all your code to handle that properly and unwrap it on deserialization, etc. which is a big mess.

Describe the solution you’d like It would be cool if this auto-conversion to int64 (or even bigger) and back to python int was completely transparent and handled in the serialization layer.

Describe alternatives you’ve considered I am now using EntityProperty(memory, EdmType.INT64) but I’m not happy with it. This topic should be dealt with on page 1 of the python SDK, pointing out “int” in python is special. I don’t know if you do this already, but you could also add special handling for numpy int64 datatype.

Additional context N/A

[lovettchris]

Cool, thanks for the quick reply. Yeah, numpy is so much of a defacto standard in the python world it makes sense to handle its datatypes in a first class way.

[YalinLi0312]

@lovettchris , thanks for your waiting! We are working on re-factoring the de/serialization of TableEntity type in this semester, we’ll take your feedback into consideration. Stay tuned!