Motivation In this blog I last discussed how to generate unique timestamps and earlier I introduced a Java UDF to generate globally unique identifiers (uuid) . The former naturally produces timestamps, while the later produces a binary string. But what if what you need is a number? Of course both timestamps and binary strings can be represented as numbers. But these will be very long.For example a naive representation of a timestamp could be the number 20120303070659765345. This is too long even for a bigint. Certainly you would not want to...
[More]
Tags: 
sequence
previous
for
unique
prevval
nextval
identity
number
currval
preval
value
uuid
curval
next