Autopopulating A New Field To An Existing Table

[mark1110]

Hi,

I have a Sybase table (myTable) that has 40,000 records in it. I added a new column to the table called SeqNo that is an integer. What I would like to do is populate the SeqNo field with a 1 for the record that has the earliest created date (01/01/10), 2 for the second earliest created date (01/02/10), 3 for the third earliest created date (01/03/10), etc with 40,000 for the latest created date (03/15/10).

Can this be done with an update statement? I tried a new without any luck. Does anyone have a suggestion as to how this might get done?

Thanks,

Mark

 

[JarlH]

I know nothing about Sybase, but if this is a one-time task I'd do like this:

Write a small stored procedure with a cursor that reads the table in create-date order. Fetch every single row and for each row assign the new column value using UPDATE WHERE CURRENT.

Execute the procedure once and you're finished!