No Integer Wrap Around in Postgres

Integers in Postgres do not wrap around. Instead they throw an “integer out of range” error.

I had an application that stored a counter in postgres. The counter was used as a 3 digit ticket number that just cycles through (e.g. 000 to 999 then back to 000). To save space, I used a smallint with explicit logic to handle overflows / wrap around in my application.

Unfortunately, one day the counter just refuses to get incremented anymore because of the overflow :(