Avoiding Duplicate EIP ID's

A recent Service Request I worked on made me realize that many customers are likely trying to interface data to their Peoplesoft system by writing to the EIP tables directly.  This approach requires them to generate an EIP ID unique to their transaction.  Given the volume of processes that might be trying to write to this table, and possible RDBMS setup differences (ie; Oracle supports persistent and non-persistent secondary database connections), it is important that any logic attempting to get an EIP number assigned verify that it does not already exist.  One example I found of how our own developers do