[GitHub] [iceberg] kevinliu-stripe opened a new issue #4204: Snapshot as LongType in metadata tables

[GitBox <gi...@apache.org>]

kevinliu-stripe opened a new issue #4204:
URL: https://github.com/apache/iceberg/issues/4204


   #### Ask
   Metadata tables (defined in #252) defines `snapshot_id` and `parent_id` a `LongType` value. Can this be defined as string value instead? As far as I know, there's no arithmetic operations on snapshot it, nor should there be. 
   
   #### Problem
   In our setup of Iceberg + Trino, we use an internal frontend to display the metadata table from Trino. The `snapshot_id` field is represented in `LongType` which is translated to Javascript Number. Because of the length of the snapshot id, the representation is truncated so snapshot id `5184430069070270604` becomes `5184430069070270000`, with the last 3 digits are 0'ed out.
   
   This problem is due to transporting the result data to the frontend as JSON representation and JSON representation of numbers has an upper limit on the size of the number it can handle. [Here are some relevant links](https://www.npmjs.com/package/json-bigint#links).
   
   #### Possible solution
   The workaround on our side was to use the [`bignumber` javascript library](https://mikemcl.github.io/bignumber.js/) to represent snapshot id in JSON as a "big number" so it is not truncated...
   
   I think a better solution is to represent the `snapshot_id` (and related fields) as string value in the schema definition of the metadata tables
   


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