Oracle - Modify An Existing Table To Auto-increment A Column

I have a table with the following column: NOTEID NUMBER NOT NULL, For all intents and purposes, this column is the primary key. This table has a few thousand rows, each with

Solution 1:

You can't alter the table. Oracle doesn't support declarative auto-incrementing columns. You can create a sequence

CREATE SEQUENCE note_seq
  STARTWITH800
  INCREMENT BY1
  CACHE 100;

Then, you can create a trigger

CREATEOR REPLACE TRIGGER populate_note_id
  BEFORE INSERTON note
  FOREACHROWBEGIN
  :new.note_id := note_seq.nextval;
END;

or, if you want to allow callers to specify a non-default NOTE_ID

CREATEOR REPLACE TRIGGER populate_note_id
  BEFORE INSERTON note
  FOREACHROWBEGIN
  IF( :new.note_id isnull )
  THEN 
    :new.note_id := note_seq.nextval;
  END IF;
END;

Solution 2:

If your MAX(noteid) is 799, then try:

CREATE SEQUENCE noteseq
    STARTWITH800
    INCREMENT BY1

Then when inserting a new record, for the NOTEID column, you would do:

noteseq.nextval