https://bhaak.net/blog/tags/postgres/ Recent content in Postgres on Bhaak's Blog Hugo en-us Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:43:14 +0100 https://bhaak.net/blog/posts/2026-03-05-avoid-integer-for-file-sizes-in-postgres/ Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:43:14 +0100 https://bhaak.net/blog/posts/2026-03-05-avoid-integer-for-file-sizes-in-postgres/ <p>Here’s a small bug we recently encountered in production. Occasionally, PDF generation jobs would fail, and the cause turned out to be a small oversight when designing database tables.</p> <p>The PDF metadata is stored in a table, and the column for file size was defined as <code>integer</code>, also known as <code>int4</code>.</p> <p>Since this data type is signed in Postgres, those 4 bytes only allow for files up to 2.1 GB (2 147 483 647 bytes). You might think, 2^31 bytes ought to be enough for everybody &hellip; except apparently for our PDFs.</p>