<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif;font-size:12pt"><div>Fabrice --<br><br>I can't speak to Oracle directly, but Informix supports a SERIAL type (different mechanics under the hood but IIRC the port from Informix to postgres didn't have any issues with DDL declaring a SERIAL type. I'd go with that, personally, although BIGINT sequence might be needed if you anticipate enough rows to make it worth while.<br><br>When you dump the DDL for your database you'll see that something like "my_gid SERIAL PRIMARY KEY" gets broken out into the explicit sequence, but it all works out to the same thing. <br><br>I think MapServer handles SERIALs ok -- been a while since I worked with it though. ESRI doesn't work and play well with others, and I can't speak to the other applications.<br><br>HTH,<br><br>Greg W.<br><br></div><div style="font-family: times new
roman,new york,times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br><div style="font-family: times new roman,new york,times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"><font face="Tahoma" size="2"><hr size="1"><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">From:</span></b> F T <oukile@gmail.com><br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">To:</span></b> postgis-users@postgis.refractions.net<br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sent:</span></b> Fri, October 23, 2009 12:03:07 AM<br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Subject:</span></b> [postgis-users] Interoperability : SERIAL or Explicit Sequence<br></font><br>
Hello, <br><br>I would like to design a Postgresql / Postgis database that would be the most interoperable as possible.<br>The spatial tables could be used by (Select, Insert, Update, Delete) :<br>- a Web GIS (Mapserver, geoserver, ...)<br>
- commercial clients (Geoconcept, Mapinfo, FME, ESRI)<br>- Opensource clients (QGIS, GvSIG, ...).<br>Great dream Isn't it? ...<br><br>I know that some of these "soft" need to a numeric unique key (Mapserver for example don't deal with character keys...).<br>
I know OID are depreciated.<br><br>I think is would be a good idea to add a unique numeric key to all my tables.<br>What is the best way to do that?<br><br> - Add a SERIAL field (but it is PostgreSQL spécific?).<br> - Add a numeric field explicitely managed by an associated sequence (it does the same but seems more opened?).<br>
<br>So SERIAL or EXPLICIT SEQUENCE?<br><br>Thanks for your responses<br><br>Fabrice<br><br><br> <br><br><br><br>
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