AutoIncrement fields on databases without autoincrement field

Question

In MS Sql Server is easy create autoincrement fields. In my systems I stopped to use autoincrement fields for primary keys, and now I use Guid\'s. It was awesome, I\'ve got

Answer 1

I think your question is actually quite a good one. However, it is easy to get lost trying to come up with a SQL only solution. In reality you will want the optimization and transaction safety afforded by using the database implementations of the autoincrement types.

If you need to abstract out the implementation of the autoincrement operator, why not create a stored procedure to return your autoincrement value. Most SQL dialects access stored procedures in relatively the same way and it should be more portable. Then you can create database specific autoincrement logic when you create the sproc - eliminating the need to change many statements to be vendor specific.

Done this way, your inserts could be as simple as:

INSERT INTO foo (id, name, rank, serial_number)
 VALUES (getNextFooId(), 'bar', 'fooRank', 123456);

Then define getNextFooId() in a database specific way when the database is being initialized.