How to automatically increment several Integer columns based on alphabetically ordered text columns?

Question

Hello and thank you very much in advance for taking the time to look at my question. My question is as followed, I have a large dataset in PostgreSQL, recorded in a similar fashion as it is written in the table.

The Province, District and Town column are constantly updated and new rows are added. I would like to have incremental numbers for the Province_id, District_id and Town_id automatically assigned whenever a new entry is made in one of the text columns. Preferablly, the numbers would update dynamically whenever a new Province, District or Town is entered (alphabetically).

Could I use triggers to make this automatically? I have also looked a lot at things like the dense_rank() functions (but is this a good method to follow?) I would be very happy to hear if there are alternative solutions. Thank you.

Answer 1

Assumption:

These ID values will only be used for output/display and will not be used as Unique Keys or in other tables (as Foreign Keys), otherwise you'll need a lot of cascade updates and loss of performance as a single row insert would result in updating a huge part of the table and many other tables as well.

Solution:

You don't have to store these values. You can use window functions, e.g. DENSE_RANK() to calculate these number when needed.

SELECT 
    province, district, town,
    DENSE_RANK() OVER (ORDER BY province)
        AS province_id,
    DENSE_RANK() OVER (PARTITION BY province
                       ORDER BY district)
        AS district_id,
    DENSE_RANK() OVER (PARTITION BY province, district
                       ORDER BY town)
        AS town_id
FROM
    tableX AS t
 ;