PostgreSQL: `Int` type should be able to be mapped to `@db.BigInt`

Problem

At the moment, the only way to use PG’s int8 column type is by specifying BigInt type in the schema, which maps to Js’s bigint type. But there are use cases in which we want to use JS’s number type. Can have a way of using PG’s int8 column type which maps to a number type in JS?

I know maximum value for PostgreSQL’s int8 is 9223372036854775807, which is out of range of JS’s number max value (9007199254740991). But maybe that can be written as a warning in the documentation?

Suggested solution

We should be able to do:

model MyModel {
  myBigNumber Int @db.BigInt
}

Alternatives

Can’t think of any.

Thanks 🙂

(related discussion: https://github.com/prisma/prisma/discussions/6948)

EDIT Fixed wrong claims about JS maximum value for number

[MartinMuzatko]

The whole point of my examples was showing how to make TypeScript return the right types when you convert BigInts to numbers in an object. So i don’t really understand what you are saying here.

My question is: how do I apply this large-scale to any model that returns bigints, when NodeJS is able to present them as Number? I don’t want to manually do toNumber everywhere I use the model. I think the best solution is that prisma provides that functionality natively, because all other solutions impose a big overhead in code, just to apply number to all bigints.

[Kequc]

What’s got me down about this issue is I prefer to store datetime as utc bigint’s. They’re just immeasurably easier to work with than the standard date format is. But now with Prisma I’m introduced to a lot of headaches with BigInt fields, I can’t seem to select anything from my database without seeing Javascript BigInt objects everywhere.

Which causes problems for a large number of reasons. JSON stringify is only one.

I guess I’m thinking about the database as a place to store data and I don’t really care very much if the value I get back from it is "the correct format’. I should at least I think be able to tell my schema that a field returns a number.