Auto-increment support in CockroachDB

Question

In MySQL, I can use AUTO INCREMENT to generate unique IDs for my application’s customers. How do I get similar functionality when using CockroachDB?

Answer 1

Applications cannot use constructs like SEQUENCE or AUTO_INCREMENT and also expect horizontal scalability -- this is a general limitation of any distributed database. Instead, CockroachDB provides its own SERIAL type which generates increasing but not necessarily contiguous values.

For example, you would use: CREATE TABLE customers (id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY, name STRING); Then when you’re inserting values, you would use something like: INSERT INTO customers (name) VALUES ('Kira Randell') RETURNING id; This would return the randomly generated ID, which you’d be able to use elsewhere in your application