[Archivesspace_Users_Group] Size limitation in 'FiIe Size (bytes)' field

[Chris Mayo]

Hi folks,

I wanted to reach out to the list with what seems to be a database
limitation we've run up against lately, and see if it's affecting anyone
else. At BC, we use Aspace to generate structural metadata for our
digitized collections, so we're storing information about individual
digital files as Digital Archival Object Components. We decided recently
(for various reasons) to start storing more of the technical metadata for
each file, like checksums, filesize, format, etc. in the file version area
of the DAO component.

We've also recently undertaken a grant project to digitize some old
reel-to-reel audio recordings, which means that we're characterizing large
AV files for the first time, and we started getting an error when building
some of the components stating: "Data truncation: Out of range value for
column 'file_size_bytes'".

It took a while to figure out what was going on, but as best as we can
determine, the database is using a 32-bit integer to store this field,
which means that the largest number that can be stored in the field is
~2.15 billion. Since the label of the field specifically notes that this
measurement should be in bytes, it means that the field can only be used to
describe files that are about 2.2Gb or smaller, and many of our audio files
are above this limit.

Has anyone else run into this problem, or have any ideas of how it can be
dealt with? We'd prefer to keep describing size in bytes due to the
granularity and specificity that allows. I'm using the API to build our
DAOs, so currently I've just added a sanity check in my script to leave
that field for files that are too large, but we'd like to be able to get
that data in someday.

Thanks,
Chris

-- 
Chris Mayo
Digital Production Librarian
Thomas P. O'Neill, Jr. Library
Boston College
chris.mayo at bc.edu
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