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A database is also exceptionally good at doing transactional stuff like atomically incrementing something. I'd even say: This is something that belongs in the database and not in some brittle application logic.

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Generally, I agree. But in many RDBMSs, auto-increment features explicitly do not guarantee gap-less sequential ordering. If anything throws, it's easy to end up with discarded numbers, in which case you need to catch all errors, inspect the state of the sequence and/or the entity you're populating, and re-seed the sequence. At this point, I'd argue you've already left the pristine gardens of set theory and wandered into the thorny brambles of app dev.

ah! TIL:

MYSQL - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/449346/mysql-auto-increm...

POSTGRES - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2095917/sequences-not-af...

thanks!

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