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?
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