Oracle equivalent of...

Question

What is the oracle equivalent of a sql datatype bigint as an IDENTITY column with identity seed 1 and identity increment 1. I am very new to oracle so I am using TOAD to create this table. So im just looking for a KEY field such as an ID field that just creates its own number every time data is entered into any column.
Kind of like ACCESS's autonumber field. Where or what datatype in TOAD do I select for this and tell it that it should automatically create the next ID number.
For example I insert 4 rows
"Jon"
"Bob"
"Steve"
"Mark"
The result in the table should be:
1 Jon
2 Bob
3 Steve
4 Mark
(the numbers are automatic)...If I delete steve then it becomes
1 Jon
2 Bob
4 Mark
(gaps are of course OK since this is just an identity column).
Thanks,
Jon
PS: Is there a way toi change my oracle forum password ? I cant seem to find that either.

Answer 1

You can use a sequence and insert it in a trigger :
TEST@db102 SQL> create sequence test_seq nocache;
Sequence created.
TEST@db102 SQL> create table test(c1 number not null , c2 varchar2(50));
Table created.
TEST@db102 SQL> create or replace trigger test_trig
  2  before insert on test
  3  for each row
  4  begin
  5     select test_seq.nextval into :new.c1 from dual;
  6* end;
TEST@db102 SQL> /
Trigger created.
TEST@db102 SQL> insert into test(c2) values('Jon');
1 row created.
TEST@db102 SQL> insert into test(c2) values('Bob');
1 row created.
TEST@db102 SQL> insert into test(c2) values('Steve');
1 row created.
TEST@db102 SQL> insert into test(c2) values('Mark');
1 row created.
TEST@db102 SQL> select * from test;
        C1 C2
         1 Jon
         2 Bob
         3 Steve
         4 Mark
TEST@db102 SQL>