Recently I came across an error using postgres that stumped me for a while so I wanted to document it for next time. I was issuing an update statement to a table that had no numeric columns, but received the error: ERROR: value overflows numeric format. Not only did my statement not affect any numeric columns, the table itself didn’t have any numeric columns. The actual problem ended up being some malformed json that I was trying to insert into a jsonb column. The json had a value like 300e715100 which was actually part of a hashed string, but the json serializer I was using incorreclty identified it as a very large scientific notiation number, and so did not quote it. Because postgres cannot deal with a number that large it throws the error. Quoting the value properly fixed the problem. I also want to note that the error would not happen with json, only with jsonb because postgres is actually parsing the document.

select '{"v": 300e715100}'::jsonb;
-- ERROR:  value overflows numeric format
-- LINE 1: select '{"v": 300e715100}'::jsonb

select '{"v": 300e715100}'::json;
-- this statement executes without error.

You can try the code and see the error for yourself here: http://dbfiddle.uk/?rdbms=postgres_9.6&fiddle=1584330f148ab0e9ed72529dfb466a12