Autoincrementing hierarchical IDs on SQL Server

Posted by Ville Koskinen on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Ville Koskinen
Published on 2010-03-25T09:22:20Z Indexed on 2010/03/25 9:23 UTC
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Consider this table on SQL Server

wordID    aliasID    value
===========================
0         0          'cat'
1         0          'dog'
2         0          'argh'
2         1          'ugh'

WordID is a id of a word which possibly has aliases. AliasID determines a specific alias to a word.

So above 'argh' and 'ugh' are aliases to each other.

I'd like to be able to insert new words which do not have any aliases in the table without having to query the table for a free wordID value first. Inserting value 'hey' without specifying a wordID or an aliasID, a row looking like this would be created:

wordID    aliasID    value
===========================
3         0          'hey'

Is this possible and how?

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