SELECT COUNT() return typeof string

using postgres 9.2 and pg moudle 2.0.0

script like following, the count type is number in 1.1.3, but string in 2.0.0, is it by design?

pgClient.query "SELECT COUNT(*) AS cnt FROM abc;", (err, results) ->
    count = results.rows[0].cnt
    console.log typeof(count)
    pgClient.end()

Thanks Qiang

[brianc]

Unfortunately those are going to return strings now since the return type of the COUNT operator is bigint which, by definition, can exceed the maximum value of an int in JavaScript. I know it’s extremely unlikely you’d ever have more than one hundred billion rows or whatever the actual Number.MAX_VALUE is, but it’s the only way to be correct. We’ve gone back and forth and back and forth on number type conversions, and converting numbers to integers when they can possibly loose precision is the wrong way to do things.

It really sucks it introduces such a large backwards compatibility issue, but that’s why I bumped the major version. I would suggest if you know you’re never going to have more than Number.MAX_VALUE data in your database you provide a custom type parser for the number types you’d like to receive as integers. I’ve created an “example” module for reference here:

https://github.com/brianc/node-pg-parse-float

[brianc]

I think so, yeah. Sometimes I like to leave these kinda issues open as informative. But…github search is a lot better than it used to be so that’s probably a waste now. 😄