> 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
