How to implement a queue in SQL at Xaprb

This article explains how to create a fixed-size FIFO (first-in, first-out) queue in SQL, where rows added after a threshold will cause the oldest row to be deleted. There are several ways to do this, but MERGE on Oracle and DB2, and MySQL’s non-standard extensions to SQL, make an elegant solution easy.

Update a PostgreSQL blogger pointed out the obvious method I missed: triggers! There’s also a really neat PG-specific feature that allows it to work even more elegantly on that platform. Well worth a read. I sometimes wish I worked at a PostgreSQL shop so I could have time to learn as much about it as I’ve learned about MySQL.