how to determine OID of the row I just inserted???

Hello everybody,

Here's a question I have asked some time ago and Google tells me I'm
not the only one with this problem, but I haven't found a solution yet
:-(. I have a setup like this:

customer {id serial, name varchar, address bigint}
person {id serial, name varchar, address bigint}
address {id serial, street varchar}

customer.address points to address.id
person.address points to address.id

So, addresses are stored in a seperate table, customer.address and
person.address should have a value that exists in address.id. When I
add an address for customer X, I must do something like:

insert into address (street) values ('Penny Lane');
update customer set address = ??? where name = 'X';

If I would do this in pgsql there would be no problem, because the OID
is echoed when the update succeeds. But I use PHP or pl/pgsql (others
have exactly the same problem with JDBC) and I know of no way to solve
this. Something like lastval() IMHO is way too risky. I need something
like a return value:

catchOID = returnQueryOID('insert into address (street)
values ('Penny Lane'));
update customer set address = 'select id from address where
oid = catchOID' where name = 'X';

Sorry for any syntax errors in my examples (it's half semi code), I
hope you understand the problem. If somebody knows a good solution, IMO
this would be something to put in a FAQ, because exactly the same
question arises when you do an insert on a table where the primary key
is generated automatically and you want to show the result after the
row is updated (which is very common).

TIA for any help, I really need a solution...