Retrieve the sequence number just used in the insert

Question

Hi All, is there a way to use the sequence.nextval for an insert and return the sequence value in one call?
We need to port our application from MS SQLServer to Oracle. The tables in SQLServer have Identity columns as the primary key. We can do the insert and retrieve the identity column value with one call to the database. I wonder if we can do the similar thing with Oracle.
I found out that there is a "returning into" clause for an insert statement that can return information on the current row, something like: insert into tbl (id, name) values (seq.nextval, 'name') returning id into my_id. I can't get the above query to work.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Xiaoyun

Answer 1

Hi Tim,
To avoid this problem you can do one thing. If you are quering the database from java, place both the commands in a synchronised block as follows:
synchronized(this){
This will allow only one user to enter the block and hence helps to retrieve the same value.
The same procedure is followed in Survey Sample located at
http://otn.oracle.com/sample_code/tech/xml/xmldb/content.html
Have a look at that. Check the saveChoiceGroups method in ChoiceGroupCache.java
Regards,
Anupama