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# SQLite Autoincrement

In SQLite, every row of every table has an 64-bit signed integer ROWID. The ROWID for each row is unique among all rows in the same table.

You can access the ROWID of an SQLite table using one the special column names ROWID, _ROWID_, or OID. Except if you declare an ordinary table column to use one of those special names, then the use of that name will refer to the declared column not to the internal ROWID.

If a table contains a column of type INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, then that column becomes an alias for the ROWID. You can then access the ROWID using any of four different names, the original three names described above or the name given to the INTEGER PRIMARY KEY column. All these names are aliases for one another and work equally well in any context.

When a new row is inserted into an SQLite table, the ROWID can either be specified as part of the INSERT statement or it can be assigned automatically by the database engine. To specify a ROWID manually, just include it in the list of values to be inserted. For example:

>     CREATE TABLE test1(a INT, b TEXT);
>     INSERT INTO test1(rowid, a, b) VALUES(123, 5, 'hello');

If no ROWID is specified on the insert, an appropriate ROWID is created automatically. The usual algorithm is to give the newly created row a ROWID that is one larger than the largest ROWID in the table prior to the insert. If the table is initially empty, then a ROWID of 1 is used. If the largest ROWID is equal to the largest possible integer (9223372036854775807) then the database engine starts picking candidate ROWIDs at random until it finds one that is not previously used.

The normal ROWID selection algorithm described above will generate monotonically increasing unique ROWIDs as long as you never use the maximum ROWID value and you never delete the entry in the table with the largest ROWID. If you ever delete rows or if you ever create a row with the maximum possible ROWID, then ROWIDs from previously deleted rows might be reused when creating new rows and newly created ROWIDs might not be in strictly accending order.

## The AUTOINCREMENT Keyword

If a column has the type INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT then a slightly different ROWID selection algorithm is used. The ROWID chosen for the new row is at least one larger than the largest ROWID that has ever before existed in that same table. If the table has never before contained any data, then a ROWID of 1 is used. If the table has previously held a row with the largest possible ROWID, then new INSERTs are not allowed and any attempt to insert a new row will fail with an SQLITE_FULL error.

SQLite keeps track of the largest ROWID that a table has ever held using the special SQLITE_SEQUENCE table. The SQLITE_SEQUENCE table is created and initialized automatically whenever a normal table that contains an AUTOINCREMENT column is created. The content of the SQLITE_SEQUENCE table can be modified using ordinary UPDATE, INSERT, and DELETE statements. But making modifications to this table will likely perturb the AUTOINCREMENT key generation algorithm. Make sure you know what you are doing before you undertake such changes.

The behavior implemented by the AUTOINCREMENT keyword is subtly different from the default behavior. With AUTOINCREMENT, rows with automatically selected ROWIDs are guaranteed to have ROWIDs that have never been used before by the same table in the same database. And the automatically generated ROWIDs are guaranteed to be monotonically increasing. These are important properties in certain applications. But if your application does not need these properties, you should probably stay with the default behavior since the use of AUTOINCREMENT requires additional work to be done as each row is inserted and thus causes INSERTs to run a little slower.

Note that "monotonically increasing" does not imply that the ROWID always increases by exactly one. One is the usual increment. However, if an insert fails due to (for example) a uniqueness constraint, the ROWID of the failed insertion attempt might not be reused on subsequent inserts, resulting in gaps in the ROWID sequence. AUTOINCREMENT guarantees that automatically chosen ROWIDs will be increasing but not that they will be sequential.

This page last modified 2008/10/09 15:34:39 UTC