I would definitely contest that you have to lock the whole database table for readers. Modern SQL systems will not have readers waiting upon writers. And if you

I would definitely contest that you have to lock the whole database table for readers. Modern SQL systems will not have readers waiting upon writers. And if you use a SEQUENCE, like you probably should in this case, then you only need a sequence-lock once in a while. There are also fully independent schemes for this, but they cannot, usually give you ordering properties of your counter sequence. And those who can will have rather large keys (large in size of bytes)