If your intent is to insert a new record with position incremented by 1,
you should use a trigger. Look at the autoincrement thread from few days
ago.
Markus Bertheau wrote:
> В Втр, 17.08.2004, в 16:12, Bruno Wolff III пишет:
>
>>>SELECT MAX(position) FROM (SELECT position FROM classes WHERE name =
>>>'foo' FOR UPDATE OF classes) AS foo
>>>
>>>It's clear which rows should be locked here, I think.
>>
>>Even if it was allowed, it probably wouldn't be good enough because it won't
>>protect against newly inserted records.
>
>
> Can you detail an example where this wouldn't be good enough?
>
> In a PL/pgSQL function I'm doing
>
> PERFORM position FROM class_fields WHERE class = arg_class_name;
> INSERT INTO class_fields (class, field, position) VALUES
> (arg_class_name, arg_field_name, (SELECT MAX(position) FROM class_fields
> WHERE class = arg_class_name));
>
> Is this unsafe?
>
> The question initially arose because I wanted to do something similar to
>
> SELECT INTO var_new_position MAX(position) FROM class_fields WHERE class
> = arg_class_name FOR UPDATE OF class_fields;
>
> which didn't work.
>
> Thanks
>