On Jan 17, 2008 9:05 AM, James B. Byrne <byrnejb@harte-lyne.ca> wrote:
>
> If the entries involved numbered in the millions then Scott's approach has
> considerable merit. In my case, as the rate of additions is very low and
> the size of the existing blocks is in the hundreds rather than hundreds of
> thousands then I believe that I will simply write my own iterator and do a
> repetitive select when on the incrementally proposed values until an
> opening is found then insert the new entry and update the iterator next
> value accordingly.
If race conditions are a possible issue, you use a sequence and
increment that until you get a number that isn't used. That way two
clients connecting at the same time can get different, available
numbers.