On Sat, 2008-09-13 at 17:38 -0500, Tom Shaw wrote: > Can anybody give me any good reasons not to use a time stamp as an order > number in my shopping cart. It seems to me that the number is guaranteed to > be random and it saves having to make an extra time column to keep track of > the order. The only small concern I have is the chance that somebody orders > at the exact same time as somebody else but the chance of that has got to be > incredibly small but possible. > > > > My second question is I've designed a very simple Postgres database wrapper. > The methods are exactly what you would assume to see in any db wrapper a > pg_query, pg_fetch_array. My question is in the db wrapper, is there an easy > way to always include the table name as an index in all my pg_fetch_array > returned results? The reason I ask is when designing my tables I'm delegated > to prefixing my column names i.e. users_name instead of just name or > forum_posts instead of just posts to make sure there's no collision. > > > > Cheers > > > > Thomas Shaw > > Php.coder@xxxxxxxxx > > > Well, I think you answered the first part of your question yourself there! Although remotely small, it is entirely possible for two people to do something at the same time on your site. Why don't you use an auto_increment column in your table instead? There are plenty of functions in PHP to retrieve the auto_insert value (although generally different for each type of database you connect to, I only know how to do it in MySQL and MSSQL) This way, you let the database deal with the unique ID's as it's something the databases are very suited to, and you can then use the auto_insert ID in place of the value you would normally generate in PHP. Ash www.ashleysheridan.co.uk
