Support for BigAutoField has been a work in progress for 4 years now. But the ticket has the following valuable comment:
In the meantime, it suffices to use a standard AutoField and hack the database like so:
In the table in question, alter the field like so:
ALTER TABLE [table_name] ALTER COLUMN [field_name] [data_type], where[data_type]is one of the following:
- MySQL: bigint AUTO_INCREMENT
- Oracle: NUMBER(19)
- PostgreSQL: bigserial
- SQLite: integer
For every foreign key pointing to your field, you will also need to alter the column, but with these data types:
- MySQL: bigint
- Oracle: NUMBER(19)
- PostgreSQL: bigint
- SQLite: integer
This is a pain, but you only need to do it when creating tables, once. On the other hand, users shouldn't have to hack the database for such a simple feature, in my opinion. It would be super-cool if 1.3 included a fully-functional BigAutoField.
This simple django app makes this hack less of pain. Running
$ python manage.py bigautohack myapp.MyModel
Will run the needed ALTER TABLE commands, turning the database column for MyModel's primary key into a big integer, as well as all columns referencing MyModel.
To install simply run pip install django_bigautohack and add bigautohack to your INSTALLED_APPS.
You probably need to make generic foreign keys use a big integer as well.