Access to auto increment identity field after SQL insert in Java

Question

Any advice on how to read auto-incrementing identity field assigned to newly created record from call through java.sql.Statement.executeUpdate?

I know h

Answer 1

The following snibblet of code should do ya':

PreparedStatement stmt = conn.prepareStatement(sql, 
                                 Statement.RETURN_GENERATED_KEYS);
// ...

ResultSet res = stmt.getGeneratedKeys();
while (res.next())
    System.out.println("Generated key: " + res.getInt(1));

This is known to work on the following databases

• Derby
• MySQL
• SQL Server

For databases where it doesn't work (HSQLDB, Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc), you will need to futz with database-specific tricks. For example, on PostgreSQL you would make a call to SELECT NEXTVAL(...) for the sequence in question.

Note that the parameters for executeUpdate(...) are analogous.