On Jan 26, 2006, at 5:22 PM, Michael Fuhr wrote:
I suppose a sequence is out of the question?  Too easy to get it
wrong?

Well, I just wanted to avoid embedding this idea into my application. Would rather Postgres take care of it for me.

Not in the standard installation, but I think a C function that
returns GetTopTransactionId() should work.  It's trivial to write
and examples have been posted before; search the archives.

Hmm. I also see GetCurrentTransactionStartTimestamp() in xact.h. That could work as a mostly-unique identifier. Its value could survive dumps (assuming clock is set correctly!) and a little wrapper around it could be used by triggers or by default column values.

Futher reading in xact.c says:
        /*
         * This is the value of now(), ie, the transaction start time.
* This does not change as we enter and exit subtransactions, so we don't
         * keep it inside the TransactionState stack.
         */
        static TimestampTz xactStartTimestamp;

<long pause>

hahaha, *blush*. I could just use "now()", right? pg8.1 docs say that now()/CURRENT_TIMESTAMP "return the start time of the current transaction; their values do not change during the transaction". I could use a composite of (now(), GetTopTransctionId()) to assume batch uniqueness.

eric

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