At 12:52 AM 22-11-01 -0500, you wrote:

>At 11/22/2001 12:20 AM (Thursday), Geoff Worboys wrote:
> >There is nothing insane or even technically difficult about
> >maintaining an unbroken sequence. Attempting to use such a solution
> >where it is not required (such as generated key values) may be
> >somewhat crazy, but there are places where unbroken sequences are
> >required.
>
>Any examples you can think of?

Sometimes we can't persuade our superiors in the Accounts Dept that they can live without their beloved Auditable Series for product serial numbers, document numbers, etc. As long as we can help them to understand why it's a real dog of an idea to use their auditable numbers as database keys (as they learned in Accountant School in 1954), we can give them an auditable series that has a life of its own.

For some ideas about how easy or hard it is, see

http://www.ibobjects.com/docs/ti_AuditableSeries.zip

Just NEVER be persuaded that maintaining your own "generators" in a database table by having applications add 1 to the last number was ever safer in the earth's field of gravity than jumping out of an aeroplane at 10,000 feet with no parachute.

H.


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