I haven’t seen the common sense notion of converting an integer to network order and to write the resulting bytes into an indexable entity in a string – string database vs. writing the string representation of the number anywhere in the documentation of such databases.
Surely the size overhead of writing a 64-bit int as a string into a database must outweigh the trivial complexity of having to do a ntohl call before writing the bytes back into an integer type.
I am therefore missing something here, what are the downsides to using big-endian bytes vs. strings as indexable entities in string-string databases ?
(C++/C tags as I am talking about writing bytes into the memory location of a programatic type, BDB as that is the database I am using, could be kyotodb as well).
The advantage of big-endian in this case is that the strings would sort correctly in ascending order.
If the database architecture cannot natively store 64-bit integers, but you need to store them anyway, stringifying them this way is a way to do it.
Of course if you later upgrade the database to one that can store 64-bit integers natively, you will either be “stuck” with the implementation or have to go through a migration process.