Knite wrote:
This has probably been discussed in depth before, and I've found a few nodes on drupal.org that captured some of the ideas, but I'm relatively new to this list, so please forgive me and enlighten me if there's more history I should know about.
A long time ago, we made a big effort to be database independent and introducing our own sequences feature was part of that. We wanted to welcome all RDMS, even those without sequences.
AUTO_INCREMENT looks like a database feature that is supported in the databases that drupal currently supports, namely mysql and pgsql. From what I gather from documentation at mysql.org and from previous comments in our forums, it seems that AUTO_INCREMENT is an improvement over the current system of creating nid's using the sequence table (and having to lock it).
I'd like to look into moving drupal to use auto-increment instead of table locking, for both performance reasons (1 query vs 3) and webhost compatibility reasons. (There are some webhosts that do not grant LOCK TABLE permission.)
Now that we have a few years of experience with sequences, I'll agree that this feature causes a few problems with permissions, is a small performance hit, and should be dropped. I'd support a patch that removed drupal sequences in favor of built in auto-increment and such. I just don't see anyone building support for new databases and especially not those that lack native sequences. -moshe