What are the other ways of achieving auto-increment in oracle other than use of triggers?
In addition to e.g. FerranB's answer:
It is probably worth to mention that, as opposed to how auto_incement works in MySQL:
From 12c you can use an identity column, which makes explicit the link between table and auto-increment; there's no need for a trigger or a sequence. The syntax would be:
create table <table_name> ( <column_name> generated as identity );
SELECT max (id) + 1
FROM table
Create a sequence:
create sequence seq;
Then to add a value
insert into table (id, other1, other2)
values (seq.nextval, 'hello', 'world');
Note: Look for oracle docs for more options about sequences (start value, increment, ...)
If you don't really want to use a "trigger-based" solution, you can achieve the auto-increment functionality with a programmatical approach, obtaining the value of the auto increment key with the getGeneratedKeys()
method.
Here is a code snippet for your consideration:
Statement stmt = null;
ResultSet rs = null;
stmt = conn.createStatement(java.sql.ResultSet.TYPE_FORWARD_ONLY,
java.sql.ResultSet.CONCUR_UPDATABLE);
stmt.executeUpdate("DROP TABLE IF EXISTS autoIncTable");
stmt.executeUpdate("CREATE TABLE autoIncTable ("
+ "priKey INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, "
+ "dataField VARCHAR(64), PRIMARY KEY (priKey))");
stmt.executeUpdate("INSERT INTO autoIncTable (dataField) "
+ "values ('data field value')",
Statement.RETURN_GENERATED_KEYS);
int autoIncKeyFromApi = -1;
rs = stmt.getGeneratedKeys();
if (rs.next()) {
autoIncKeyFromApi = rs.getInt(1);
}
else {
// do stuff here
}
rs.close();
source: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=3368856
A trigger to obtain the next value from a sequence is the most common way to achieve an equivalent to AUTOINCREMENT:
create trigger mytable_trg
before insert on mytable
for each row
when (new.id is null)
begin
select myseq.nextval into :new.id from dual;
end;
You don't need the trigger if you control the inserts - just use the sequence in the insert statement:
insert into mytable (id, data) values (myseq.nextval, 'x');
This could be hidden inside an API package, so that the caller doesn't need to reference the sequence:
mytable_pkg.insert_row (p_data => 'x');
But using the trigger is more "transparent".