BIGINT vs Java's long

According to the Java Language Specification,
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/second_edition/html/typesValues.doc.html#9151

"For long, from -9223372036854775808 to 9223372036854775807, inclusive"

Indeed, I have java code which generate random long's and println's them,
and I end up with values equal to -9223372036854775808.

I had those println's redirected to a .sql file which I ran against
psql to update some bigint columns, but I got
ERROR: int8 value out of range: "-9223372036854775808"

Apparently bigint's don't like that value?

Well confused, since 8 bytes should be 8 freaking bytes, I turned to JDBC.

That's when things got weird, first I tried declaring a long variable with
that value, and got a compilere error (Integer to large) or something like
that.

So I declared "long myBigint = Long.MIN_VALUE" and that compiled, but when
I tried using that value in a Statement.execute() I got the exact same
error.

Anyone know what's going on? Here's the test code, using jdbc7.0-1.2.jar:

import java.sql.*;

public class testPGSQLbigint {

public static void main( String[] args ) {
try {
Class.forName("org.postgresql.Driver");
} catch (java.lang.ClassNotFoundException e) {
System.out.println( e );
}

Connection db=null;
String url = "jdbc:postgresql:abinitio2";
try {
db = DriverManager.getConnection(url,"dav","");
} catch ( SQLException e ) {
System.err.println( e );
}

// the following gives a compiler error
//long bigint = -9223372036854775808;
long bigint = Long.MIN_VALUE;
String sql_ = "update chembase set fp0 = "+bigint+" where id =
27948;";
System.out.println(sql_);

try {
Statement st = db.createStatement();
st.execute( sql_ );
st.close();
} catch ( SQLException e ) {
System.err.println( e );
}
}

}

output:
$ java -classpath /opt/java/jars/jdbc7.0-1.2.jar:. "testPGSQLbigint"

update chembase set fp0 = -9223372036854775808 where id = 27948;
java.sql.SQLException: ERROR: int8 value out of range: "-9223372036854775808"

note this runs the same in linux and win2k (using Sun's SDK)

--
Dav Coleman
http://www.danger-island.com/dav/