The best way would be to set the id field as an auto_increment field (or whatever the Oracle equivalent is) and you won't need to worry about it, the field will get updated/increment on every new ticket insertion.

Make the SQL engine do your work for you!

Barring that, this should work with Oracle, though I do most of my SQL in mySQL. This assumes that your tickets are numerical:

I suggest you run this statement after the user has submitted input and right before you're going to update the table, so you don't have to worry about simultaneous submissions as much. You can use this value as your id.

You probably should look into subselects, they would allow you to do something like:

insert into auth (id,stuff,stuff2) values((select max(id)+1 from ticke
+ts),$stuff1,$stuff2);
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