How to make unique incrementing counter in MySQL - mysql

Question

How to assign unique auto incrementing values to a certain column? Kind of like AUTO_INCREMENT does but it should be NULL at the time of insertion and assigned at some later point.
I have a table that gets regular data inserts and a few workers that process that data and set processed_at datetime field when they're done. Now I want incrementally select new processed rows since the last call. If I naively use where processed_at > #last_update_time I'm afraid there might be a situation where some records are processed at the same second and I miss some rows.
update: Can I just do
begin;
select #max := max(foo) from table1;
update table1 set foo = #max + 1 where id = 'bar' limit 1;
commit;
if foo column is indexed?

Answer 1

You can use a trigger to implement that.
CREATE TABLE my_increment (value INT, table_name TEXT);
INSERT INTO my_increment VALUES (0, 'your_table_name');
CREATE TRIGGER pk AFTER UPDATE ON your_table_name
BEGIN
UPDATE my_increment
SET value = value + 1
WHERE table_name = 'your_table_name';
UPDATE your_table_name
SET ID2 = (
SELECT value
FROM my_increment
WHERE table_name = 'your_table_name')
WHERE ROWID = new.ROWID;
END;
But bear in mind that this trigger will work on every execution of the Update query.
You can also do it manually:
Create the table to store increment value:
CREATE TABLE my_increment (value INT, table_name TEXT);
INSERT INTO my_increment VALUES (0, 'your_table_name');
Then when you want to update the table, get the last value from this table and insert value+1 to your column needed to be incremented.