Re: Using a postgres table to maintain unique id?

Poet/Joshua Drake wrote:
> 
> >However, I also use Postgres (7.0.2) throughout this
> >application and it seems cleaner to me to keep the current
> >id value in a table and just use postgres to provide access
> >(with a trigger function to increment the id on access).
> 
> Why not a sequence?

Can someone show me how to create (and use) an int8 sequence?

> >Is this reasonable?  Is it fast?  (I need 10 or more IDs
> >generated each second.)  Can I avoid having the table
> >gradually fill with "old" rows for this entry, and this
> >avoid the need to run VACUUM ANALYZE periodically?
> 
> The only problem I have had with this type of thing is when a number gets
> deleted, it does not get recycled.

Fortunately, I don't want any number to ever get recycled - the id needs to
be unique throughout the 25+ year lifetime of the project.  The table
would have a single row with a single column.  Selecting that table cell
would return the current value, but leave the value incremented in the
table cell (it's ok if it increments the value before returning).


--
Steve Wampler-  SOLIS Project, National Solar Observatory
swampler@noao.edu