Re: Ever increasing OIDs - gonna run out soon?

On 6/12/06, Alex Turner <armtuk(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Just a quick thought - I know that I don't fully understand tables with
> oids, and table without oids, is there a link to some more information about
> why you need oids, or why you don't that I could reference as I'm a bit lost
> on the subject of oids

dont get lost, just forget you ever heard about them :). oid is a
'free' userland autoincrement counter which has some problems. It was
a hidden column that in older versions of postgresql was implicitly
added to your tables. newer versions of pg assume you dont want OIDs
on your table. (system tables still use them, tho).

for purposes of a global counter or table level ID generator,
sequences are basically better in every way. use them. some
middleware such as the odbc driver used to work better/easier if you
had a column but afaik this is not the case anymore.

Merlin