R help - Dec 2008 - very long integers

A quick question really:

I have a database with extremely long integer IDs (eg  
588848900971299297), which is too big for R to cope with internally  
(it appears to store as a double), and when I do any frequency tables  
erroneous results appear. Does anyone know of a package that extends  
internal storage up to LONG, or is the only solution to read it in as  
a character from the original data?

In case anyone is curious, I didn't create the IDs, and in some form I  
must conserve all of the ID information for later use.

Thanks,

Aaron

A quick question really:

I have a database with extremely long integer IDs (eg  
588848900971299297), which is too big for R to cope with internally  
(it appears to store as a double), and when I do any frequency tables  
erroneous results appear. Does anyone know of a package that extends  
internal storage up to LONG, or is the only solution to read it in as  
a character from the original data?

In case anyone is curious, I didn't create the IDs, and in some form I  
must conserve all of the ID information for later use.

Thanks,

Aaron

If they are IDs, you presumably don't need to perform arithmetic on them, so
why not store them as strings?  If you're reading them with read.table, see
the colClasses parameter.  I am not sure how to do this in RODBC;
as.isthere (as in read.table) does not affect columns that look like
numbers --
[perhaps you have to convert on the DBMS side?

           -s

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 11:57 AM, Aaron Robotham
<smashbuns@gmail.com>wrote:
> A quick question really:
>
> I have a database with extremely long integer IDs (eg 588848900971299297),
> which is too big for R to cope with internally (it appears to store as a
> double), and when I do any frequency tables erroneous results appear. Does
> anyone know of a package that extends internal storage up to LONG, or is
the
> only solution to read it in as a character from the original data?
>
> In case anyone is curious, I didn't create the IDs, and in some form I
must
> conserve all of the ID information for later use.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Aaron
>
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