I’m running into a problem when I try to save big integer values from R into my PostgreSQL database. The numbers keep getting changed into exponential format instead of staying as regular integers.
I’m working with R version 3.5 on Windows 64-bit, and I also tested this on Ubuntu 64-bit with R 3.3. The weird thing is that it doesn’t happen every time - maybe 10% of the time the numbers save correctly, but most of the time they get messed up.
For example, when I try to save a number like 88888567543, it ends up being stored as something like 1.8299144e-298 in the database.
Has anyone dealt with this before? I’m wondering if there’s a different R package I should be using or some other workaround that might help with this issue.
I’ve hit this exact issue before. PostgreSQL’s converting your big integers to scientific notation during transfer. The inconsistent behavior happens because R sometimes passes these values as floating-point instead of keeping them as integers. Here’s what works: convert your large integers to strings in R first with as.character(), then cast them back to bigint in PostgreSQL using CAST(column_name AS BIGINT). This skips the floating-point conversion completely and you’ll get consistent results. Also make sure your PostgreSQL column is BIGINT, not INTEGER, so it can handle the large values.
It appears you’re encountering a common issue of data type mismatches between R and PostgreSQL. I recommend being explicit with column types when transferring data to the database. If you’re using RPostgreSQL or RPostgres, ensure that you utilize the field.types parameter when writing to the database. For example, in dbWriteTable, specify field.types = c(your_column = “bigint”) to ensure PostgreSQL recognizes the correct data type. The scientific notation is often a result of R treating large integers as doubles instead of integers, leading to inaccuracies during the write operation. You might also consider utilizing the bit64 package, which specifically manages large integers effectively before insertion.
check your R variable types - run class() to see if they’re really integers. I had this issue where my ‘integers’ were just numeric in R, messed up the conversion. try options(scipen=999) in R to stop scientific notation globally, and ensure your postgres column is bigint.