Postgresql – Select multiple ids from a PostgreSQL sequence

nextvalpostgresqlselect

Is there a concise way to select the nextval for a PostgreSQL sequence multiple times in 1 query? This would be the only value being returned.

For example, I would like to do something really short and sweet like:

SELECT NEXTVAL('mytable_seq', 3) AS id;

And get:

 id  
-----
 118
 119
 120
(3 rows)

Best Solution

select nextval('mytable_seq') from generate_series(1,3);

generate_series is a function which returns many rows with sequential numbers, configured by it's arguments.

In above example, we don't care about the value in each row, we just use generate_series as row generator. And for each row we can call nextval. In this case it returns 3 numbers (nextvals).

You can wrap this into function, but I'm not sure if it's really sensible given how short the query is.

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