How to use long id in Rails applications?

Question

How can I change the (default) type for ActiveRecord's IDs? int is not long enough, I would prefer long. I was surprised that there is no :long for the migrations - does one just use some decimal?

Answer 1

Credits to http://moeffju.net/blog/using-bigint-columns-in-rails-migrations

class CreateDemo < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :demo, :id => false do |t|
      t.integer :id, :limit => 8
    end
  end
end

• See the option :id => false which disables the automatic creation of the id field
• The t.integer :id, :limit => 8 line will produce a 64 bit integer field