Drupal convert nid/vid from int to bigint

I am busy with a project where the nid and vid values may reach its limit. I need a mechanism to modify current and future nid and vid data types from int to b开发者_C百科igint.

I figured maybe there was a schema alter hook, or something limilar. I see there is a hook called hook_schema_alter.

How reliable will it be to build a module that simple checks for nid and vid in the schema, and modifies it to be a bigint? Would this be a practical way of solving the problem? Will it work with all content types, module ones and cck?

G.

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As hook_schema_alter will only be fired on module install, rather than build a complex module that manages this automatically, you should pick a subset of modules that you know you will be using, install them, and manually update the schema.

If you are going to have 4 billion nodes (other poster said 2bn, but nid is unsigned which doubles the available range) you really should not be turning modules on and off at random. Your architecture should be rock solid and planned out well in advance.

Also, what's your use case for wanting that many nodes in Drupal? Any kind of database operation with that many rows is going to be very, very intensive even when fully optimized and without the weight of the Drupal stack (and it's love of expensive JOIN queries) on top of it.

Drupal will be fine for prototyping whatever you're building but by the time you hit xxx,000 nodes you'll already be spending the majority of your time hand-tuning everything for performance. You may get x,000,000 nodes if you have serious world-class expertise and funding. For anything more, you will probably want to start looking at offloading that data into a database system that is specifically optimized for huge datasets and then access it from Drupal as a service.

Take a look at Hadoop and Cassandra for examples of DBMS' that can scale to billions of items (Google, Facebook, Twitter etc use them).

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If your nid/vids are going to get past 4 billion you might have some other issues to deal with before you care about this :) Also since you are in D6 if this isn't like say 200,000,000 pieces of content & 20 revisions, but rather something else like stock price change information or something I would store it in it's own table.