G'day Dave,
The solution depends a lot on what is acceptable. I don't forsee
a problem in what you propose that would predictably break
autonum. My experience with autonum has been very majorly
problem free. I still use it on all but a few of the tables in BizMan
and only not use it on those for reasons other than autonum unreliability.
One consideration is with an upper limit of 2 billion in an integer
column if you set the autonumber to increment by 100 you would
not want to have an anticipated number of entries greater than 200,000.
I had to provide in my Jobs table for users to import data from
other programs so have a unique PK autonumber on JobID and
another column for OPJobNum (other programs job number) for
them to search for values based on the old system. Turns out
many want to assign an ID to a job based on their own unique
parameters so it's getting more use than I at first thought.
So one solution might be to incorporate another ID column in
which to insert the old numbers and leave the autonumb column
alone - start at and increment by 1.
Another might be to leave the autonumber off and first insert all the
records from the old databases then set the autonum to one greater
than the highest existing value.
If you need to add old and new records progressively yours is not an
unworkable solution.
At 09:26 6/06/01 -0400, you wrote:
>In a client table I'd like to use autonumber to assign the id numbers.
>However, I'd also like to include the clients from the last two (RBase)
>databases going back about ten years (this for record management purposes).
>
>Some of our client records may never have been in a database and there is a
>possiblity that a large number of records may need to be inserted manually.
>
>My question is will I eventually break autonumber in this way? I don't
>understand what activities may cause RBase to quit autonumbering. I'd had
>(few) problems in the past that I could fix by deleting and recreating the
>autonumber, but I'd like to know if I'm setting myself up.
>
>I've tested inserting numbers manually into an autonumber column and the
>only effect I've seen is that the next autonumber skips ahead of what would
>normally be assigned.
>
>For instance, if set to increment by 100 I can insert four records and
>insert one record (100, 200, 300, 400, 50) the next autonumber is 600. This
>is fine, I don't need a rigid sequence -- no one will ever ask me what
>happened to 500.
>
>tia
>
>paranoid Dave
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Warmest regards,
Tom Grimshaw
coy: Just For You Software
tel: 61 (0)2 9552 3311
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