I just found a scenario where a custom record created ~5 minutes after another custom record (same record type) has an internal id less than the one created first. I always assumed the internal id is always increased each time a new record is created, but that doesn't appear to be the case?

No such requirement

@battk sorting by date created is the only reliable way?

Probably not the only, but it is the most obvious

Any other ways you know out of the box without some customizations?

It depends what you're trying to achieve. Often uniqueness is actually sufficient for a given application, it's the humans that want to complicate things. Add a last modified/created timestamp to the record if you need sorting

You probably want to list whats wrong with the created date

It's likely fine unless there are know issues such as NS only tracks down the to second and it's not clear how sorting would work if two records are created in the same second.

Internally in NS, it's probably the way Oracle sequence caching works, with different RAC nodes assigned batches of sequence values

you could try using internal id as the second sort, but created date works for me by itself

yeah seems like overkill to use both

I'm pretty sure I had netsuite confirm that internal ids are monotonically increasing numbers

"The assignment of internal IDs to new records *is sequential*" ...... "However, the sequence of internal IDs does not indicate when or in which order records were added."