Re: urban myth?

[Michael T. Babcock]

Boyd E. Hemphill wrote:

>To all who answered thank you.  This answer below is the one that I can
>use to convince him what he proposes is not necessarily safe.  
>  
>

I almost always have a timestamp column immediately after my 
auto_increment'ed primary key column which I use for ordering by 
insert/update order.  To get rows from oldest to most recent, I just:

CREATE TableName (
    ID smallint unsigned not null auto_increment primary key,
    MTime timestamp,
    Data ...
);

SELECT * FROM TableName ORDER BY MTime ASC;

If you want "created" order as well, you can do:

CREATE TableName (
    ID smallint unsigned not null auto_increment primary key,
    MTime timestamp,
    CTime timestamp,
    Data ...
);

INSERT INTO TableName (CTime, Data) values (now(), ...), (now(), ...), ...

That will give you an MTime that's auto-updated based on last 
modification and a CTime that is the creation timestamp.
-- 
Michael T. Babcock
http://mikebabcock.ca/