BIGINT Data Type

An 8-byte integer data type used in CREATE TABLE and ALTER TABLE statements.

Syntax:

In the column definition of a CREATE TABLE statement:

column_name BIGINT

Range: -9223372036854775808 .. 9223372036854775807. There is no UNSIGNED subtype.

Conversions: Impala automatically converts to a floating-point type (FLOAT or DOUBLE) automatically. Use CAST() to convert to TINYINT, SMALLINT, INT, STRING, or TIMESTAMP. Casting an integer or floating-point value N to TIMESTAMP produces a value that is N seconds past the start of the epoch date (January 1, 1970).

Examples:

CREATE TABLE t1 (x BIGINT);
SELECT CAST(1000 AS BIGINT);

Usage notes:

BIGINT is a convenient type to use for column declarations because you can use any kind of integer values in INSERT statements and they are promoted to BIGINT where necessary. However, BIGINT also requires the most bytes of any integer type on disk and in memory, meaning your queries are not as efficient and scalable as possible if you overuse this type. Therefore, prefer to use the smallest integer type with sufficient range to hold all input values, and CAST() when necessary to the appropriate type.

For a convenient and automated way to check the bounds of the BIGINT type, call the functions MIN_BIGINT() and MAX_BIGINT().

If an integer value is too large to be represented as a BIGINT, use a DECIMAL instead with sufficient digits of precision.

NULL considerations: Casting any non-numeric value to this type produces a NULL value.

Partitioning: Prefer to use this type for a partition key column. Impala can process the numeric type more efficiently than a STRING representation of the value.

HBase considerations: This data type is fully compatible with HBase tables.

Text table considerations: Values of this type are potentially larger in text tables than in tables using Parquet or other binary formats.

Internal details: Represented in memory as an 8-byte value.

Added in: Available in all versions of Impala.

Column statistics considerations: Because this type has a fixed size, the maximum and average size fields are always filled in for column statistics, even before you run the COMPUTE STATS statement.

Sqoop considerations:

If you use Sqoop to convert RDBMS data to Parquet, be careful with interpreting any resulting values from DATE, DATETIME, or TIMESTAMP columns. The underlying values are represented as the Parquet INT64 type, which is represented as BIGINT in the Impala table. The Parquet values represent the time in milliseconds, while Impala interprets BIGINT as the time in seconds. Therefore, if you have a BIGINT column in a Parquet table that was imported this way from Sqoop, divide the values by 1000 when interpreting as the TIMESTAMP type.

Related information:

Numeric Literals, TINYINT Data Type, SMALLINT Data Type, INT Data Type, BIGINT Data Type, DECIMAL Data Type (CDH 5.1 or higher only), Impala Mathematical Functions