Answer
ArcGIS clients do not support 64-bit integers although ArcSDE allows their creation for use by other applications following the alteration of the 'INT64TYPES' parameter within the 'server_config' table in the ArcSDE repository.
If a table column is altered to use the INT64 data type using the following sde command and accessed within ArcGIS (ArcMap/ArcCatalog), the error shown below may be encountered:
ArcSDE Command
Code:
sdetable -o alter_column -t <table_name> -c test_col -z int64 -u ... -p ... -i ...
Error message
"Invalid column data type. The field is not nullable."
If a value greater than 2.14 billion is input into this field, the following error may be seen when accessing the table:
"Underlying DBMS error [ORA-1455: converting column overflows integer datatype][<table_name>]. The workspace is not connected."
One method that can be employed to access layers with INT64 fields from ArcGIS is using Query layers available with version 10 and above. Using this method, the attribute and geometry data can be accessed as long as the value does not exceed 2.14 billion. In the event there are rows with values triggering the ORA-1455 overflow error this can be worked around through exclusion of the field containing the INT64 type or exclusion of the row where this large value is found when creating the query.