Spatial joining big number returns Null!

[KevinBell]

  Spatial join can't hold numbers bigger than a Long Integer?!!!  Ouch.

[DanPatterson_Retired]

Can you elaborate on what you mean?

[KevinBell]

I'm trying to sum the value of every building in a given district and arcgis desktop 10.1 can't handle big numbers.   Long integers can store up to 2 billion or so.  If your sum is more than that the spatial join will return Null.  You don't get a warning or anything.  This could be damaging if you weren't paying attention.

[DanPatterson_Retired]

I would be surprised if Esri used long integers for summation when double would be more appropriate given that you can always downscale data...if this is in your table, I use double as the default for all numeric operations and downscale if I need integer

[KevinBell]

I was suprised.  Go try it out.  Maybe I'm missing something.

Downscaling the data is an inconvenient necessity that I've been doing for the last hour.

[DanPatterson_Retired]

Have you tried doing the average as well as the sum...assuming the count * avg for your field will give you the total.  count and sum are indeed  Long types, but avg is Double, and Long * Double should upscale to double

[KevinBell]

That very well may work… seems like ESRI should just fix it instead of requiring data gymnastics.

[KevinBell]

I've written my own spatial join python script to push the data into an appropriate datatype.  bigint would work fine I'd guess, but the point of my post is a warning to users that the spatial join out of the box will give BAD results if you've got a bunch of big numbers.

[DanPatterson_Retired]

I agree Kevin but I suspect your sums might be in a distinct minority

[KevinBell]

not really big data...  just too big for a great tool that needs improvement.

I've got a database of 62 billion data points that is the back end for the map at solarsimplified.org and each of those data points is a double.  That's big data!