PHP integer limit and Oracle 8i sequences

Hello, I am using PHP 4 and Oracle 8i for a very large database and have a question regarding the use of Oracle sequences as keys to tables and accessing those tables by key. Oracle sequences are auto-generated integers whose upper limit is 10**38. How large can a PHP 4 integer variable be? In "Professional PHP Programming" it says that the range for integers is -2 billion to +2 billion. This was version 3+. Has this changed? The obvious problem is that when a sequence passes 2 billion, PHP 4 will not be able to handle the primary key. Is this the case or is there a known workaround/solution? Note: php.net says that the max size is OS dependent. I looked at snaps.php.net and couldn't find any information there. Thanks in advance.