ah, yes, those famous marketing events. Life can be hard sometimes Especially on the next morning

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I was already thinking about storing the 'next' ID in a table somewhere and keeping it up to date using triggers.

Maybe a trigger on delete to get the lowest number isn't that bad from a performance point of view.

By the way, if at all possible, I would use an IDENTITY. But hey, Business people request the stupidest things from time to time

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I do like IDENTITY, too. But no guarantee to be really ongoing. So I decided for myself to forget about this and use consecutive numbering only when presenting data.

Another alternative depends on which tool you use to present the data. AFAIK, at least the Access Report Generator, has a VERY easy way to implement consecutive numbering on an sorted result set. Works very nice and I think other programms can do the same trick. So I really see no need to put that much brainwork into some logic when it isn't neccessary at all.

And yes, I know, Business people are sometimes beyond good and evil.

Cheers,