Path: newssvr20.news.prodigy.com!newsmst01.news.prodigy.com!prodigy.com!pd7cy2so!shaw.ca!news-out1.nntp.be!propagator2-sterling!news-in-sterling.newsfeed.com!ptdnetS!newsgate.ptd.net!small1.nntp.aus1.giganews.com!border3.nntp.aus1.giganews.com!intern1.nntp.aus1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!nntp.golden.net!news.golden.net.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 11:06:09 -0600 Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 12:06:09 -0500 From: Phil User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031205 Thunderbird/0.4 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.databases.oracle.server Subject: Re: forcing the developers to use sequences References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: Lines: 26 NNTP-Posting-Host: 209.183.137.18 X-Trace: sv3-pp0OBMG2wAwKtZiwYkevLZYuaVjjZzWIt7GaGi/0GmYq3XmC+o0cxoa8XDmgG4AKxPmPpyQq4/4YxvG!wlcTPmw93pc8AgnlSbCSOcdFJerepNSYZkQdWboBnbY8OnqbIKk4zlIv6Db7m0iknZQ7lyLZJg== X-Complaints-To: abuse@golden.net X-DMCA-Complaints-To: abuse@golden.net X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.1 Xref: newssvr20.news.prodigy.com comp.databases.oracle.server:249994 Syltrem wrote: > You can create a trigger AFTER INSERT on the table. > This way, any value set by a program can be overridden by the trigger. > That`s the best way to do it but it does not remove the need to educate > programmers... > The problem with using a trigger to populate the column is that it doesn't educate the programmers as what the proper solution is, as you have indicated. The other problem with a trigger is that for those programmers that do use the sequence to populate the table, you have needless gaps in the numbers generated, which isn't a big deal, just avoidable. A unique index on the column may help because the client program will fail when a duplicate value is attempted to be inserted or updated, which is a real probability with programmers not using the sequence to populate the column. This puts the onus on them to fix their program to use the sequence. HTH Phil