At 11:23 Friday, 20.02.2004 +0100, you wrote:

>So, the value before inserting is of no importance.

In that case I wouldn't show it to the user - and then, I wouldn't have to
get a value before insert at all...

But I understand what you're feature request is about. I was thinking about
sequential numbering, too, more than one time. But I don't want to use
generators for this because I always can imagine a case where one number
gets lost. Even if you always take care at the client before the INSERT
statement is issued a BSOD could occur on the client or your harddisk could
crash. This would leave you with a missing number on the db server which
you would have to deal with in other ways.

Have a look at the thread "Idea for a new field type for FB 2,0 or IB 7?"
starting around here (Nov 2001):
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/firebird-support/messages/5661?viscount=-30
I especially like Doug Chamberlin's posting ;-)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/firebird-support/message/5716

bye,
Markus