From: Nathaniel Talbott <nathaniel@...>
Date: 2004-07-29T10:02:25+09:00
Subject: Re: Stupid ODBC!

On Jul 28, 2004, at 19:58, Lennon Day-Reynolds wrote:

> Nathaniel: While SQL Server does have convenience functions for
> checking the current/most recent identity value, it does not require
> that you have any IDENTITY column in a table schema at all. In fact,
> many database design guidelines suggest you avoid them entirely, as
> they are simple numeric identifiers which have no semantic
> relationship to the data in your column. I'm not enough of a SQL
> Server guru to know in practice what portion of tables will lack an
> IDENTITY field, but I do know that the possibility, along with the
> suggestions I've seen in "best practices" documents to avoid them,
> makes me nervous about relying on that feature.

Then I don't understand something about your request; you said you were 
looking for:

> standard way of getting an identifier for the last row inserted

If a row is expected to have an identifier, then it's going to have to 
have an identity column. I believe other databases, such as Postgres 
and MySQL, don't force you to have an identity column, either, so I 
don't see what makes SQL Server any more onerous than other databases 
(in this regard; I have lots of other reasons to hate it if you need 
some).

Am I missing some context here on Active Record?


Nathaniel
Terralien, Inc.

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