ORM or something to handle SQL tables with an order column efficiently

Question

I got an Java application using SQL tables that contains an ordered list of entities, ordered by an order column. I would like to add/remove things in/from the middle of the

Answer 1

My advice is to do two things:

1. Choose very large increments between your items, say one million. This way you can move an item at 8,000,000 to before 7,000,000 by changing just it to 6,500,000; and
2. Every now and again reorder the items as a batch job.

The large increments don't eliminate the problem of doing a large reorder but the need to do a big reorder highly unlikely and the batch job is there to reorder them say once every day/week/month as required.

Changing a whole bunch of items at once is just messy and asking for trouble.