Re: Database

> Anyway, what I'm wondering is when you insert into the database, is the new > record necessarily always going to be the last record in the database table? > In otherwords, to find out the last directory I wrote to can I simply pull > the last row out of the table? Is it sequential? You should never count on the most recent insert to be the "last" record. Instead you should use a sequence to generate a unique, incremented, series of numbers. If you specify an "id" field as "serial" datatype in PostgreSQL when you create the table, a sequence is automagically created for you and the default value of the field is set to the nextval of the sequence. If the table already exists, you could still create the sequence and add an insert trigger to accomplish the same thing. Then you can query for the max(id) to get the last record. If this isn't clear you can email me off-list and I'll give you some more concrete examples. > > Also, if I can just pull out the last row to find out what the last one is > that I wrote to, is there anyway to do this on the order of magnitude of > O(1)? or is the only way O(n)? Now I am using ODBC for this and can't use > any of the functionality with the pg_... calls. I need an extremely > efficient way of determining this as it is time critical and I don't want to > have to wait. > Not sure what you're asking here. If you mean, is there any way to avoid a serial read through the table, the above suggestion with the addition of an index on the id field will work. Hope this helps, Joe