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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