"Adriaan van Os" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Right, I want to use it with a bulk operation, say importing a million records > with COPY. Calling nextval one million times looks to me like an enormous > waste > of resources. Suppose, you are on an ADSL line: it will cost one million times > the ping time of the ADSL line (say 10 milliseconds per call). Well OK, one > could write a server function that does this, but then the one million result > values must be transported back to the client, because they are not guaranteed > to be contiguous. Unneeded complexity compared to a simple nextval increment > parameter.
The usual way to use nextval() is to use it on the server as an expression in an INSERT or DEFAULT. If you're using COPY and don't have a column default set up then, hm, I guess you're kind of stuck. That would make a good use case for a one-time nextval(increment) or something like that. -- Gregory Stark EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com Ask me about EnterpriseDB's PostGIS support! ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match
