Re: one more word about rules

Abe,
How do you generate your article number? If you are using a SERIAL, then
you could change it to use a specific SEQUENCE and step the SEQUENCE by
some value other than one. Something like:

CREATE SEQUENCE article_sequence INCREMENT 100 MINVALUE 1 START 101;

CREATE TABLE article (
article_number int4 default nextval('article_sequence')
);

That would automatically generate article numbers 101, 201, 301, ...
thus leaving room for "inserted" articles.

On Fri, 22 Sep 2000, Abe Asghar wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I have built a database that uses int4 as the unique identifier for a news
> database.
>
> Therefore an article has a identifier 1, the next one has 2 etc.
>
> Then I order them when they are displayed on the web reversely so that the
> last article added is at the top of the list.
>
> I now face a major problem.  If we need to back dackdate an article - I
> can't.  This is because the all the indexes are taken up ie 1, 2, 3......75
> odd records.  If I want to add one between 50 and 51 ie 50.5, I cannot
> because the field is an int4.
>
> One idea I had to get around this was to create a new table with this column
> as a float and read and write all therecords in with a PHP script.
>
> Is there an easier way such as converting the column data type from a int4
> to a float.
>
> Thanks in advance.
> Abe.
>