I’ve spent the last few years largely abstracted from relational database DDL, relying on DBAs or frameworks (e.g., Hibernate) to do that for me or working with alternate persistence technologies (e.g., an XML database, Web Services, etc.).
For a quick project, I’m working with raw Oracle DDL, and I’m a little shocked at how primitive it is. Still no auto-incrementing type? Still no boolean type? Really?
Ben Galbraith 
I’m often amazed at how slow the commercial database vendors are to adopting features. While there is no auto-incrementing type in Oracle, using sequences will do basically the same thing. Don’t know what to tell on the boolean issue, just lame.
Joseph: Sure, sequences are the answer, I just am amazed that you have to create the sequence and then create the trigger instead of just saying the type is “AUTO_INCREMENT_LONG” or something user-friendly. I didn’t care about this eight years ago, but now its lack of inclusion is bizarre and sad.
True, I guess that I’ve been spoiled by PostgreSQL providing a SERIAL data type that does all the work of setting up the sequence for you.