Suppose I've an ID column in database:
I want to delete row number 3:
Now Id's in my database are following:
Question: Is it possible to reuse (in this case) ID 3 field. So ID 4 jumps to ID 3 field? So database should be like that:
I also know about RESEED command DBCC CHECKIDENT (MyTable, RESEED, desiredIDNumber), but I don't think that I need this in my case. Becase ALL ID's from (in my case) 2> will change. (ID3 gets ID4, and ID4 gets ID5. ID5 does not exists anymore).
Are you asking if there is a magical command to do this? Not that I have ever heard of. {Frankly I have never heard anyone even want to do this before}
Are you asking if this is technically possible? Sure. It would be a major undertaking. You could write a program that does this but the overhead of all that work to change all of the foreign key references would be pretty massive which leads to ...
Why? What are you expecting to get out of this? "Empty" space does not hurt. Did you run out of space in the integer field?
The general idea would be: UPDATE T SET ID = ID - 1 WHERE ID > 3
You can customize this to your liking. Probably you need to enable identity insert for this statement.
Be careful because this might cause corruption if other data references these IDs. IDs are generally not supposed to change. Maybe you rather add a new column ContiguousID INT NOT NULL and let the IDENTITY value alone.
If the Id column is an identity column, you cannot get Sql Server to fill in the missing IDs as part of it's automatic increment process. It won't do it.
You can fill in the ID yourself, by using the SET IDENTITY_INSERT command.
Generally, it's not worth the trouble.
Related
I have a Form Windows program in C# that adds a record to the database and can remove it.
In the database i have ID (which is Auto Number), but if i delete a record and if i want to add another record instead, the Auto Number increases and doesn't add the missing numbers.
I mean that if i have 9 records in my Access Database and i want to remove a record, it will be 8, but when i add a new record, i get 10 instead of 9. like this picture:
Is there any solution for that?
If it's an auto number, the database will generate a number greater than the last one used - this is how relational databases are supposed to work. Why would there be solution for this? Imagine deleting 5, what would you want to do then, have the auto number create the next record as 5? If you are displaying an id in your C# app - bad idea - then change this to some other value that you can control as you wish.
However what you are trying to achieve does not make sense.
if i delete a record and if i want to add another record instead, the Auto Number increases and doesn't add the missing numbers.
[...]
Is there any solution for that?
The short answer is "No". Once used, AutoNumber values are typically never re-used, even if the deleted record had the largest AutoNumber value in the table. This is due (at least in in part) to the fact that the Jet/Ace database engine has to be able to manage AutoNumber values in a multi-user environment.
(One exception to the above rule is if the Access database is compacted then the next available AutoNumber value for a table with a sequential AutoNumber field is reset to Max(current_value)+1.)
For more details on how AutoNumber fields work, see my other answer here.
In MS access, there is no any solutions for this. But in case of sql server you can create your own function rather using Identity column.
I am rewriting a new timesheet application including redesigning database and it will require data migration from Oracle to Oracle.
In the old system field ‘EmployeeCod’ is a Primary Key and it is in Alphanumeric form i.e. ‘UK001’, ‘UK002’,‘FR001’,’FR002’, ‘US001’ . Employee table is also linked to timesheet and other tables where the EmpCode is being referred as a FK.
To make the JOINs perform faster in the new system I was thinking about adding a new INT column in the Employee table and set it to PK. (Don't know if it will make any big difference)
-Employee table has about 600 rows.
-Data type of EmpCode is Varchar2(20) in old DB which I can reduce to Varchar2(6) in the new system and alter it later as company expends.
I am wondering if it is better to keep the EmpCode as a Primary Key which will make things easier in migrating data or should I add a INT column?
Someone has given me following advise in one of my previous thread:
“if you need to create a composite code of AANNN then I'd split this into two: a simple 'Prefix' field of CHAR(2) and an identity field of INT, then turn EmpCode into a computed field that concats the two and stick an index on there that (#Chris)”
I am not sure if this option would work as employee table is linked to other tables as well. (EmpCode is being used as FK in other tables)
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If you do add this PK, and also keep the former PK, you will have some data management issues to deal with. Or perhaps your customers. Getting rid of the old PK may not be feasable if there are existing users who will be upgrading to the new database.
If EmployeeCode, the former PK is used by the users of the data to identify Employees, then you will have to add a constraint to make sure that this field is unique. Carrying both codes will wipe out any performance gains you were hoping for.
If it were me, I'd leave well enough alone. The performance gains, if any, will be trivial.
The performance difference will be negligible if the index you're creating on the alphanumeric field is the clustered index for the table. Which, based off of your question is going to be the case, but I wanted to note that for completeness. I say this for two reasons:
A clustered index is the physical order of the table and so when seeking against that index, looking for more data presumably off of the data page in a query, a binary search can be performed against it because it's also physically stored in that order.
A binary search is just about as efficient as you can get, lest we forget though a statistical index. I call this out because integer primary keys build statistical indexes which are as fast a seek as you can get because mathmatically speaking we know 2 comes after 1 for example.
So, just keep that in mind when building alphanumeric, or even compound, keys and indexes and trying to compare the difference between them and an integer key. Personally, I prefer to stick with integer primary keys because I have found them to perform better over time during extreme growth.
I hope this helps.
I use alphanumeric primary keys regularly and see absolutely no issues with it. There is no performance issue, you have a wider addressable space, and you can be more expressive/human readable. Integer keys are just a convention.
Add to that the risk you're adding to you project by adding a major architectural change over and above the porting issues, I'd say stick with the existing schema as much as possible.
There will be no performance improvement - in fact, unless you know and can prove/measure that you have a performance problem, changing things "to make them faster" usually leads to pain.
However, there is a concern that your primary key appears to carry meaning - it's a country code, concatenated with a number. What if an employee moves from the US to the UK? What if the UK hires its 1000th employee?
For that reason, I'd refactor the application to use a meaningless primary key; whether it's an INT or a VARCHAR is not hugely relevant.
You do occassionally come across alphanumeric primary keys.. personally I find it just makes life more difficult.. if you are able to change it and you want to change it, I would say go ahead.. it will make things easier for you later. As for it being an FK, you would need to be careful to write a script to properly update all the data. One way you can do this is:
Step 1: Create a new int column for the PK and set Identity Insert to true
Step 2: Add a new int column in your child table and then:
Step 3: write an update script like this:
UPDATE childTable C
INNER JOIN parentTable P ON C.oldEmpID = P.oldEmpID
SET C.myNewEmpIDColumn = P.myNewEmpIDColumn
Step 4: Repeat steps 2 & 3 for all child tables
Step 5: Delete all old FK columns
Something like that and don't forget to backup your current DB first ;)
Just a quick question, how would one map a primary key which must be assigned manually (data type int). So, there is no identity in the database, if code was manually written you would probably open a transaction, lock the table, take the highest id, increment by one, and insert the record with the new value.
Set the Id generator to be assigned. Find more info at http://barchitect.blogspot.com/2008/07/nhibernate-generator-and-primary-key.html
Actually, I used the increment generator, which somehow I've overlooked to exist. It has some constraints about its usage, but it suits the situation for now.
How would I get the primary key ID number from a Table without making a second trip to the database in LINQ To SQL?
Right now, I submit the data to a table, and make another trip to figure out what id was assigned to the new field (in an auto increment id field). I want to do this in LINQ To SQL and not in Raw SQL (I no longer use Raw SQL).
Also, second part of my question is: I am always careful to know the ID of a user that's online because I'd rather call their information in various tables using their ID as opposed to using a GUID or a username, which are all long strings. I do this because I think that SQL Server doing a numeric compare is much (?) more efficient than doing a username (string) or even a guid (very long string) compare. My questions is, am I more concerned than I should be? Is the difference worth always keeping the userid (int32) in say, session state?
#RedFilter provided some interesting/promising leads for the first question, because I am at this stage unable to try them, if anyone knows or can confirm these changes that he recommended in the comments section of his answer?
If you have a reference to the object, you can just use that reference and call the primary key after you call db.SubmitChanges(). The LINQ object will automatically update its (Identifier) primary key field to reflect the new one assigned to it via SQL Server.
Example (vb.net):
Dim db As New NorthwindDataContext
Dim prod As New Product
prod.ProductName = "cheese!"
db.Products.InsertOnSubmit(prod)
db.SubmitChanges()
MessageBox.Show(prod.ProductID)
You could probably include the above code in a function and return the ProductID (or equivalent primary key) and use it somewhere else.
EDIT: If you are not doing atomic updates, you could add each new product to a separate Collection and iterate through it after you call SubmitChanges. I wish LINQ provided a 'database sneak peek' like a dataset would.
Unless you are doing something out of the ordinary, you should not need to do anything extra to retrieve the primary key that is generated.
When you call SubmitChanges on your Linq-to-SQL datacontext, it automatically updates the primary key values for your objects.
Regarding your second question - there may be a small performance improvement by doing a scan on a numeric field as opposed to something like varchar() but you will see much better performance either way by ensuring that you have the correct columns in your database indexed. And, with SQL Server if you create a primary key using an identity column, it will by default have a clustered index over it.
Linq to SQL automatically sets the identity value of your class with the ID generated when you insert a new record. Just access the property. I don't know if it uses a separate query for this or not, having never used it, but it is not unusual for ORMs to require another query to get back the last inserted ID.
Two ways you can do this independent of Linq To SQL (that may work with it):
1) If you are using SQL Server 2005 or higher, you can use the OUTPUT clause:
Returns information from, or
expressions based on, each row
affected by an INSERT, UPDATE, or
DELETE statement. These results can be
returned to the processing application
for use in such things as confirmation
messages, archiving, and other such
application requirements.
Alternatively, results can be inserted
into a table or table variable.
2) Alternately, you can construct a batch INSERT statement like this:
insert into MyTable
(field1)
values
('xxx');
select scope_identity();
which works at least as far back as SQL Server 2000.
In T-SQL, you could use the OUTPUT clause, saying:
INSERT table (columns...)
OUTPUT inserted.ID
SELECT columns...
So if you can configure LINQ to use that construct for doing inserts, then you can probably get it back easily. But whether LINQ can get a value back from an insert, I'll let someone else answer that.
Calling a stored procedure from LINQ that returns the ID as an output parameter is probably the easiest approach.
I'm just getting dirty in WinForms, and I've discovered, through a lovely tutorial, the magic of dragging a database table onto the design view of my main form. So, all is lovely, I've got my DataGridView with all of the columns represented beautifully.
BUT...
When I run my application against this brand new, empty .sdf (empty save for the two tables I've created, which are themselves empty), I get a -1 in the column corresponding to my primary key/identity column whenever I try to create that first record.
Any idea why this might be happening? If it helps, the column is an int.
#Brian -1 is a good choice for the default value since no "real" rows are likely to have identities less than zero. If it defaulted to 0 or 1 then there'd be a chance that it'd clash with an existing row, causing a primary key violation.
For applications that stay offline and create multiple rows before saving, a common practice is to continue counting backwards (-2, -3, -4) for each new row's identity. Then when they're saved, the server can replace them with the true "next" value from the table.
Since it is an Identity column and you haven't saved it to the database yet it is -1. I am assuming here that this is before you save the table back to the database, correct? You need to perform the insert before that value will be set correctly.