if this interests you at all, i found this yesterday on the evolt.org mailing list. the gentleman who has put this very useful code basically suggested that i could "base36" my auto_increment IDs. i will leave this here for those of you who are intersted:
http://www.faqts.com/knowledge_base/view.phtml/aid/17710 i use this in the same table. one of the ID fields is auto_incremented. when an ID is generated, i calculate the base36 of that number and put it into my other field which i have to use for my purposes. php or mysql should consider putting this code in their language itself, especially mysql because it can be used for alphanumeric sequences! i dont know if i am making sense, but my problem is solved. hope this helps someone! :) cheers/erick --- Carl McNamee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Erick, > > We did that very thing here. Our staff wrote a Unique Record > Identifier > (URI) program that was called by the programs that actually put the > data > into the database. The generated URI was then used as the primary key. > However, I must say up front that this type of thing is fraught with > problems. Here are the ones we ran into that I'm aware of. > 1. Performance can stink. If you ask the URI generator for each > record > things are slow. We got around this somewhat by figuring out how many > records a program was working with and requresting a block of URI's. > So now > you have to modify your programs too! > 2. The URI generator must keep track of the URI's it hands out. So > you > need another database table, and its associated overhead, just to keep > track > of this. > 3. If the system crashes and the URI tables were not updated you could > start handing out duplicate URI's after the system recovers. How will > your > application handle this? The database will reject the records assuming > that > the URI is your primary key but how do you fix the URI database? > > If anyone responds with a better way it would be great if you'd post it > to > the mysql list. > > Carl McNamee > Systems Administrator > Billing Concepts > (210) 949-7282 > > -----Original Message----- > From: Erick Papadakis [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: Monday, July 08, 2002 6:30 AM > To: mysql > Subject: mysql primary key question! > > > hello, > > i hope some database guru can help me with this! > > i need to set up an auto_increment field inside mysql. for various > reasons, the maximum size is 3. but i don't want this to be ONLY > integers > because that limits me until 999 numbers only. since i have all > flexibility for these three digits or letters, i want to include > numbers > and some characters into it as well. e.g., > > m78 > 23a > 1pt > 1~8 > !76 > > ...etc can all be valid keys for me. > > how can i generate such numbers on the fly? if not inside mysql, then > inside php? AND...be sure that the "key" so generated has not been used > before as an id field in my data? > > any ideas would be very welcome! > > thanks very much in advance/erick > __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
