Question

We are looking at various options in porting our persistence layer from Oracle to another database and one that we are looking at is MS SQL. However we use Oracle sequences throughout the code and because of this it seems moving will be a headache. I understand about @identity but that would be a massive overhaul of the persistence code.

Is it possible in SQL Server to create a function which could handle a sequence?

Answer 1

That depends on your current use of sequences in Oracle. Typically a sequence is read in the Insert trigger.

From your question I guess that it is the persistence layer that generates the sequence before inserting into the database (including the new pk)

In MSSQL, you can combine SQL statements with ‘;’, so to retrieve the identity column of the newly created record, use INSERT INTO … ; SELECT SCOPE_IDENTITY()

Thus the command to insert a record return a recordset with a single row and a single column containing the value of the identity column.

You can of course turn this approach around, and create Sequence tables (similar to the dual table in Oracle), in something like this:

INSERT INTO SequenceTable (dummy) VALUES ('X'); SELECT @ID = SCOPE_IDENTITY(); INSERT INTO RealTable (ID, datacolumns) VALUES (@ID, @data1, @data2, ...)