BigInteger support for NUMERIC columns in JDBC

[pm at netcetera.ch]

Hello

Since people are reposting their suggested improvements for JDBC I'll 
respost one of mine: BigInteger support for NUMERIC columns.

Officially BigInteger is only supported for BIGINT columns. If I have a 
NUMBER(19) column I need to do

.getBigDecimal(x).toBigIntegerExact()

it would be more convenient if I could do

.getObject(x, BigInteger.class)


For that BigInteger would have to be supported for any DECIMAL or 
NUMERIC column with a 0 scale in addition to TINYINT, SMALLINT, INTEGER, 
BIGINT columns.

These column types already support Long. Long in addition supports 
FLOAT, DOUBLE, BIT, BOOLEAN, CHAR, VARCHAR, LONGVARCHAR. These can be 
added for consistency. Unfortunately I could find no documentation for 
what should happen for Long if there is a non-zero scale.

To my understanding this needs an update to TABLE B-5.

Such a change would be source compatible and could be implemented easily 
in drivers supporting multiple versions.

Philippe