Oracle Auto-Increment Guide: Using Sequences

To implement auto-increment in Oracle, you can use a Sequence object which generates unique incremental values. The following syntax can be used to create a Sequence.

Generate a sequence named sequence_name with optional settings including increment by a specific number, starting value, maximum and minimum values, cycling or not, and caching options.

In this case, sequence_name is the name of the sequence, INCREMENT BY specifies the value to increment by each time (default is 1), START WITH specifies the starting value of the sequence (default is 1), and MAXVALUE and MINVALUE specify the maximum and minimum values of the sequence. CYCLE and NOCYCLE determine if the sequence will cycle, while CACHE and NOCACHE specify if the sequence will be cached.

After creating a sequence, you can use the following syntax to retrieve the next value in the sequence:

Get the next value from the sequence named sequence_name.

This will return the next unique value in the sequence. It can be inserted into a table’s auto-increment field to achieve auto-increment functionality. For example:

Add a new record to the table with the ID automatically generated and the name as ‘John’.

The next value in the sequence will be inserted as the id in the table.