[OSM-dev] Exhaustion of 32bit signed integer range expected this year

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Fri Apr 13 15:15:10 BST 2012


Hi,

    this is just a reminder that our current highest node ID is about 
1.7 billion, and that it grows by about 0.05 billion every month.

This means that it is likely that by the end of 2012, we will have 
reached (or be very close to reaching) the end of the 32bit "signed 
integer" range (2.15 billion, or 2^31-1).

See also:
http://tools.geofabrik.de/munin/osm_nodes-year.png

Software processing OSM data will need to either use unsigned integers 
(which can be problematic in cases where negative values are also 
required), or switch to 64bit integers altogether.

This is also relevant when dealing with database tables; depending on 
what schema you are using, you might have 32bit signed IDs there as well.

osm2pgsql can be compiled with 64bit ID support but that is not enabled 
in the standard binary distributions.

If you are in any way involved with writing software for OSM, it may be 
worth thinking about that now.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"



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