On 18 Sep 2008, at 07:45, Joerg Bruehe wrote:
> Stut schrieb:
>> On 17 Sep 2008, at 22:12, Jerry Schwartz wrote:
>>> I have records that should be sequentially (not auto-increment)
>>> numbered,
>>> but there are gaps. Is there any elegant way of finding the gaps?
>>
>> Why do they need to be sequential? When this requirement comes up
>> it's
>> usually for illogical reasons.
>
> I don't know his application,
> but I do remember a similar requirement caused by some German rules on
> bookkeeping which demanded that booking numbers were assigned
> without gaps.
>
> That law may be illogical, but for the DB application designer this
> doesn't help - s/he has no choice but to follow it.
Autonumber will accomplish that, so long as you don't delete any. And
if you do, renumbering the bookings would cause more problems than it
solved.
This reminds me of when my parents used to make me account for every
cheque I'd written, and they did it by ensuring I had a reason for
each sequentially numbered cheque in the cheque book. Any I had
written and then destroyed had to be marked as destroyed - it
couldn't actually be missing!! I see the same issue here and the same
solution works.
-Stut
--
http://stut.net/
