“Gangnam Style” Breaks YouTube’s 32-Bit Barrier

blogs.wsj.com

4 pointsmatti34 comments

> Exactly how Google knew they needed to upgrade their counter is still unknown

`SELECT videoid FROM videos ORDER BY views DESC LIMIT 1`?

"Apparently, they never planned for a video to exceed a 32-bit integer mark and their counter can’t handle past the number 2,147,483,647."

Hmm... any reason not to have used unsigned integers here?

It violates the Google style guide[0] to use unsigned integers. Plus, it'd only defer the problem for another ~2 billion views or so. May as well switch to signed 64-bit integers if you have to swap out the data type.

[0] https://code.google.com/p/google-styleguide/

Oh, that's interesting. Thanks.

And I wasn't suggesting using unsigned 32-bit integers now, I was curious why they weren't used before (the number of views seems to be a nonnegative quantity...).

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