Thread: auto_increment?

Hi.I recently had to port a script from using Postgres to MySQL. In Postgres, when I have to use a unique id, I
createa sequence
 
and call nextval('sequence') each time I insert a new line in the table.MySQL doesn't have sequences (as far as the
documentationshows).
 
So I had to look for an alternative. I found an atribute "auto_increment"
which seems pretty interesting. If I do
CREATE TABLE table (
id       int4 primary key auto_increment,
name     text,
email    text);
It automatically assigns the next value when I do
INSERT INTO table (nome, email) values ('My name', 'me@somewhere.com');
When I noticed MySQL didn't have sequences, I cursed a lot. When I 
found this out, though, I kept wondering if Postgres also had it, but I
couldn't find any mention in the documentation. Does anyone know if something
similar exists? Am I doing thins the hard way? Is there any other way of 
automagically getting unique ids?TIA,

    rbp

________________________________________________________________________Rodrigo Bernardo Pimentel     <rbp@pobox.com>|
GPG KeyID: 81F85A48LinuxSP           <http://www.linuxsp.org.br>|      Fingerprint:AirGeeks
<http://www.airgeeks.org>|7E629CA2 C95B FC86 B334
 
_____________ Debian Linux User ______________|203E C011 2E4D 81F8 5A48

On Thu, 21 Oct 1999, Rodrigo Bernardo Pimentel wrote:
>     I recently had to port a script from using Postgres to MySQL. 
>     In Postgres, when I have to use a unique id, I create a sequence
  In Postgres, you can use "serial" column type. In MySQL, it is
"auto_increment".

Oleg.
----    Oleg Broytmann     http://members.xoom.com/phd2/     phd2@earthling.net          Programmers don't die, they
justGOSUB without RETURN.
 

On Thu, 21 Oct 1999, you wrote:

>    When I noticed MySQL didn't have sequences, I cursed a lot. When I 
>found this out, though, I kept wondering if Postgres also had it, but I
>couldn't find any mention in the documentation. Does anyone know if something
>similar exists? Am I doing thins the hard way? Is there any other way of 
>automagically getting unique ids?
>    TIA,

Use the serial datatype. It automatically creates a sequence for you that
increments each time you do an insert,
-- 
-David Rugge

http://www.mindspring.com/~davidrugge/index.html