Hashing a String to a Numeric Value in PostgreSQL

Question

I need to Convert Strings stored in my Database to a Numeric value. Result can be Integer (preferred) or Bigint. This conversion is to be done at Database side in a PL/pgSQL

Answer 1

You can create a md5 hash value without problems:

select md5('hello, world');

This returns a string with a hex number.

Unfortunately there is no built-in function to convert hex to integer but as you are doing that in PL/pgSQL anyway, this might help:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/8316731/330315