[postgis-users] Numeric overflow when inserting large polygons

[Hartmut Tschauner]

Dear listers,

I have just finished installing PostgreSQL 7.4 and PostGIS 0.8 on a RedHat 9
machine. The installation seems to have gone fine and everything usually
works as expected. However, I'm having trouble with a few very large
polygons in my test layers that cause a numeric overflow error when I try to
enter them into PostGIS tables using SQL code generated by shp2pgsql.
"ERROR: numeric field overflow. DETAIL: The absolute value is greater than
or equal to 10^8 for field with precision 19, scale 11."

The offending polygons belong to two MULTIPOLYGON layers and have 2373,
5654, and 17840 2D vertices, respectively. The remaining polygons of the two
layers, which have up to 1824 and 731 vertices, respectively, are accepted
into the database without problems. I have tested the geometry of the two
layers using JUMP and several other tools, all of which did not report any
topological anomalies.

I was under the impression that the size of the PostGIS geometry type had no
limit (see message by Dave Blasby to this list, Jul 24, 2001). Is that wrong
or is there any other explanation for my problem? Any suggestions would be
greatly appreciated. My data include numerous large polygons, so this
question is of importance to me.

Happy holiday season to everyone,
Hartmut

Hartmut Tschauner
Dept. of Anthropology
Harvard University
Peabody Museum
11 Divinity Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02138
ph. (617) 384-9803
fax (617) 496-8041