On Feb 18, 6:08 pm, Paul Boddie <p...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 18 Feb, 13:36, django_user <amalt...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > > How can stop postgresql from incrementing the primary key value, so > > that even after many failed insert statements it get the next id val. > > "Auto-incrementing" columns, typically implemented using the serial > data type [1], employ sequences. > > From the manual: > > "To avoid blocking of concurrent transactions that obtain numbers from > the same sequence, a nextval operation is never rolled back; that is, > once a value has been fetched it is considered used, even if the > transaction that did the nextval later aborts. This means that aborted > transactions may leave unused "holes" in the sequence of assigned > values. setval operations are never rolled back, either." > > http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/functions-sequence.html > > In other words, to permit a decent level of concurrency, PostgreSQL > doesn't wait to see if a transaction succeeds with a value from a > sequence before updating the sequence. If you want to reset a sequence > so that it always uses the next unused value as determined by looking > at the table, I suppose you could do something like this: > > select setval('mytable_id_seq', x) from (select max(id) as x from > mytable) as y; > > But I doubt that you would want to do this too often in any system > with any reasonable level of concurrent access to the table or the > sequence concerned. > > Paul > > [1]http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/datatype.html#DATATYPE... so wouldnt I run out of ids one day, if there are lot of failed insert statements, lets say for every successful insert there are 50 unsuccessful inserts, so ids would be 1, 50, 100, and once I have thousands of rows, I will run out of IDs ? should I use bigserial instead ? Thanks ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
