RE: Best way to make a table of non-unique rows, unique?

Elvis,

I've looked on Page 8 of the article your link took me to and could not find anything about the subjects you wrote about. I even did a search on auto and increment with no results. Page 8 seems to be talking about Visual Explain. While I found the Visual Explain article helpful, I found nothing on the Auto-increment and Identity column.

I was thinking about the topics you mentioned but couldn't remember in which manual I could find all the info. So, anything to which you can point me would be helpful.

My thinking was to put triggers on the vendor's tables I need. These triggers would be looking for INSERTs, UPDATEs or DELETEs. When those were detected, I would copy the row to a similar table with all the same columns but with the addition of the columns you mention and/or a datetimestamp column and an "operation" column where I would insert an "I", "U" or "D" for the operation that caused the insert in the "similar" table. Then I could put a unique index on the columns you mentioned and/or my datetimestamp and operation column which would make each row unique. I realize this would, in essence, create rows of "history" but I think this is a faster solution than complex programming and if the users know about the data when they create their queries they can take that into account and either disregard whatever rows they don't need or take advantage of the history if that better suits them. In any case, I would add these new "similar" tables to the remote journal used by DataPropagator in the DW LPAR and DataPropagator would be satisfied with a unique index and my entire project won't be side-tracked because of OLD, OLD, bad design wherein the advantages of a relational database were ignored in favor of OLD, OLD application development methodologies.

I very much appreciate everyone's input.

Thanks,

Dave