Skip to Content
Joe Celko's Thinking in Sets: Auxiliary, Temporal, and Virtual Tables in SQL
book

Joe Celko's Thinking in Sets: Auxiliary, Temporal, and Virtual Tables in SQL

by Joe Celko
January 2008
Intermediate to advanced
384 pages
8h 1m
English
Morgan Kaufmann
Content preview from Joe Celko's Thinking in Sets: Auxiliary, Temporal, and Virtual Tables in SQL

Chapter 15. Numbering Rows

PROCEDURAL PROGRAMMERS CANNOT seem to shake the idea of a physical row number being exposed to them. The idea that there is no sequential access or ordering in an RDBMS, so “first,” “next,” and “last” are totally meaningless, is lost on them.

The bad news is that many vendors provide such numberings by exposing their underlying physical storage model. The most common method is to auto-increment a counter as new rows are added to a table. This assumes that the SQL product inserts whole rows in a sequence, just as we added records to the end of a magnetic tape. This is not true for SQL engines with parallelism or that work with columns rather than rows.

If you want an ordering, then you need to have a column that defines ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Joe Celko's SQL Programming Style

Joe Celko's SQL Programming Style

Joe Celko
PostgreSQL Query Optimization: The Ultimate Guide to Building Efficient Queries

PostgreSQL Query Optimization: The Ultimate Guide to Building Efficient Queries

Henrietta Dombrovskaya, Boris Novikov, Anna Bailliekova
Effective SQL: 61 Specific Ways to Write Better SQL, First Edition

Effective SQL: 61 Specific Ways to Write Better SQL, First Edition

John L. Viescas, Douglas J. Steele, Ben G. Clothier

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780080557526