How should values of DuckDB's HUGEINT be cast to an Iceberg type?

[ghalimi]

DuckDB supports the HUGEINT type for signed sixteen-byte integers, but Apache Iceberg does not. How should values of this type be cast? A pragmatic option would be to use long 64-bit signed integers, but this would result in significant loss of information. Assuming this is acceptable, what should be done with values that are out of bounds? Otherwise, which alternative options should be considered?

Link: Types

[ghalimi]

This is probably not urgent.

[alexey-milovidov]

ClickHouse had the same question when we added the integration with external databases (MySQL, Postgres, etc.), and the obvious solution is to fall back to the String data type.

[ghalimi]

That could be an option indeed. Thank you.