Re: Risk in using sequence number?

You don't give enough information to determine whether or not your developer is correct or not.
This developer is most certainly correct if:

1 you have multiple users / processes generating events. In this case even going down to 100ths of seconds still leaves a chance for a race condition to occur.
2 you are not running OPS. There may ba a more meaningfull key to put here but on single instance Oracle, there much fewer "what if" scenerios with sequences.
3 have a rate of transactions that is high enough that it could outpace dbms_utility.get_time. My bet is a well cached sequence will beat the get_time procedure in terms of performance.

Your developer is wrong if:
1 you use OPS. This is a real can of worms any way you look at it. The sequence is no longer reliable at a point in time reference so you can't use it. I imagine sysdate could pose a problem as well due to A) race conditions and B) two nodes not being synched on time 2 your events happen serially at a rate of less then 1 per second.

One thing to consider might be to look at Advanced Queues. I'm pretty sure they guarentee that records will come out in a FIFO order.

Good Luck

P.S. Everyone please feel free to shoot holes in the points I made.    

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