Many database applications make use of “meaningless ids” or “synthetic keys” rather than using columns of user data to construct the primary key for their tables. For a very long time, the Oracle RDBMS has supplied the “sequence” mechanism to generate such values efficiently and with minimum contention between transactions. Despite a history of several decades, sequences are often misunderstood and misused – and there are a few threats involving sequences that Oracle Corp. is still working to minimize.
In this short series of articles, I aim to eliminate the most typical misunderstandings, warn you of the threats and provide