3 ms·
> 'when the auto-incrementing integer used in the bowels of the internet banking customer session management system overflows during a holiday period, what happ
by josephg 3y ago
> 'when the auto-incrementing integer used in the bowels of the internet banking customer session management system overflows during a holiday period, what happens is none of the bank's customers can log to access their money any more, so they become very angry, and then a bunch of staff get paged and spend days firefighting to bring the system back up'
There are a lot of outcomes that are much worse than simple downtime, with a clear error message in the logs. I'd much rather downtime than quiet data corruption & mysterious downstream errors, especially in a banking system.
Also a 64 bit signed integer can store numbers up to 9223372036854775807. If you consume one integer every time someone logs in to your website, your system will be able to handle the entire population of the USA logging in every second continuously for 835 years. Its a pretty safe integer size for most tasks.