Re: creating "a perfect sequence" column

> On Sun, Jul 6, 2008 at 7:33 PM, Berend Tober wrote:
> > This question comes up a lot. A term used in prior
> discussions is "gapless
> > sequence".
> >
>
Thank you, i didn't know the term so when I'd searched the archives, i hadn't found much.

> > What would be really more interesting for discussion
> on this community forum
> > is a detailed description or your actual use case and
> requirements.
>
it's sort of a formal document management system. the assigned gapless numbers are frozen at the end of each month. until then, an authorized user will be able to delete a document. but ...

> reusing numbers
> already shown to
> a user is a recipe for a disaster. they write down the
> number, and
> two weeks later reference it, but it's not there.
>
... when I mentioned them (management) this, they accepted that this was not a really good idea after all, thanks a lot :) i will assign numbers when closing the month, so everything will be fine.

in the mean time i did some research for other rdbms and i guess, what i was looking for was more along the lines of e.g. the row_number() function of mssql [1]. fwiw this seems like the most efficient pagination solution, assuming, of course, the rdbms implements this functionality efficiently.

[1]: http://www.davidhayden.com/blog/dave/archive/2005/12/30/2652.aspx