CockroachDB Data Types Cheatsheet

In this post, we are going to introduce all data types that CockroachDB supported so that you can use them properly in CockroachDB.

All supported data types

Name	Description	Size
ARRAY	A 1-dimensional, 1-indexed, homogenous array of any non-array data type.	Variable, but recommended under 1 MB.
BOOL or BOOLEAN	A Boolean value.	1 byte in width.
BYTES, BYTEA, or BLOB	A string of binary characters.	Variable, but recommended under 1 MB.
COLLATE	It lets you sort STRING values according to language- and country-specific rules, known as collations.
DATE	A date value, a year, month, and day.	8 bytes in width.
DECIMAL, DEC, or NUMERIC	An exact, fixed-point number.	Variable, but recommended under 64 kilobytes.
FLOAT	A 64-bit, inexact, floating-point number.	8 bytes in width.
INET	An IPv4 or IPv6 address.	32 bits for IPv4 or 128 bits for IPv6.
INT	A signed integer, up to 64 bits.	Variable.
INTERVAL	A span of time.	24 bytes in width.
JSONB, or JSON	JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data.	Variable, but recommended under 1 MB.
SERIAL	A unique 64-bit signed integer.	Variable.
STRING	A string of Unicode characters.	Variable, but recommended under 64 kilobytes.
TIME or TIME WITHOUT TIME ZONE	A time of day with no time zone.	8 bytes in width.
TIMESTAMP	A date and time pairing.	12 bytes in width.
UUID	A 128-bit hexadecimal value.	128 bits in width.

INT types

Name	Allowed Width	Aliases
INT	64-bit	INTEGER, INT8, INT64, BIGINT
INT4	32-bit	None
INT2	16-bit	SMALLINT
BIT	1-bit	None
BIT(n)	n-bit	None

Notes:

In PosgreSQL, JSONB and JSON are two different data types. In CockroachDB, the JSONB / JSON data type is similar to the JSONB data type in PostgreSQL.
The SERIAL type is equivalent to INT DEFAULT unique_rowid().
These are aliases for SERIAL:
- SERIAL2
- SERIAL4
- SERIAL8
- SMALLSERIAL
- BIGSERIAL
SERIAL2 and SERIAL4 are the same as SERIAL and store 8-byte values, not 2- or 4-byte values as their names might suggest.
These are aliases for STRING:
- CHARACTER
- CHAR
- VARCHAR
- TEXT

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