I'm adding an 'index' column to a table in SQLite3 to allow the users to easily reorder the data, by renaming the old database and creating a new one in its place with the extra columns.
The problem I have is that I need to give each row a unique number in the 'index' column when I INSERT...SELECT the old values.
A search I did turned up a useful term in Oracle called ROWNUM, but SQLite3 doesn't have that. Is there something equivalent in SQLite?
You can use one of the special row names ROWID
, OID
or _ROWID_
to get the rowid of a column. See http://www.sqlite.org/lang_createtable.html#rowid for further details (and that the rows can be hidden by normal columns called ROWID
and so on).
No SQLite doesn't have a direct equivalent to Oracle's ROWNUM.
If I understand your requirement correctly, you should be able to add a numbered column based on ordering of the old table this way:
create table old (col1, col2);
insert into old values
('d', 3),
('s', 3),
('d', 1),
('w', 45),
('b', 5465),
('w', 3),
('b', 23);
create table new (colPK INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT, col1, col2);
insert into new select NULL, col1, col2 from old order by col1, col2;
The new table contains:
.headers on
.mode column
select * from new;
colPK col1 col2
---------- ---------- ----------
1 b 23
2 b 5465
3 d 1
4 d 3
5 s 3
6 w 3
7 w 45
The AUTOINCREMENT
does what its name suggests: each additional row has the previous' value incremented by 1.
select rowid, * from exampleTable
sqlite is already adding rowid for you, no need to do the same twice. Note that rowid will be reused by the sqlite after a LOT of inserts, when old ones are deleted.