Best practices: .NET: How to return PK against an oracle database?

Question

With SQLServer, it seems to be generally accepted that adding a SELECT SCOPE_IDENTITY() to the end of your insert is the best way to return the PK of the newly-inserted reco

Answer 1

The stored procedure and the returning clause have the distinct benefit of a single database call any other solution is inferior. Whether you do it via a stored procedure or you use a returning clause is a whole can of worms in itself.

Answer 2

You can use the RETURNING clause to do this in Oracle stored procs.

For example:

TABLEA has NAME and EMP_ID. EMP_ID is populated internally when records are inserted.

INSERT INTO TABLEA(NAME) VALUES ('BOB') RETURNING EMP_ID INTO o_EMP_ID;

That's assuming that line is in a stored proc with an output parameter of o_EMP_ID.

Hope that helps... if not, here's a more detailed example:

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/appdev.102/b14261/returninginto_clause.htm

Answer 3

The RETURNING clause is intended for just this kind of usage, so I would call it a best practice to use it.

An alternative would be to select seq.CURRVAL after the insert. That returns the last value obtained from the sequence by this session.