Re: PHP/MySQL: Auto Increment

I'm not certain what you're after. Is it a way to preclude users from accessing the tables while you're running your PHP routine? LOCK TABLES will do it; check the MySQL manual. I wonder, though, why you're doing the renumbering (though I sorta like the neatness of it myself). If you want to sort them in order of submission/creation/whatever you could use TIMESTAMP or one of its variants. There're no performance gains to be had from row order; check out this link from U. Texas-Austin on database normalization. The first normal form addresses row ordering specifically. http://www.gslis.utexas.edu/~l384k11w/normover.html Hope this is useful. cheers, curt Beau Hartshorne wrote: > > Hi, > > I am creating a simple database to store course information. Each course is > to have a unique primary key. I generate this key using the auto increment > feature in MySQL. When I create a table, and add a bunch of rows, I get > something like this: > > ID > -- > 1 > 2 > 3 > 4 > > Once I delete a few rows, the database might look like this. > > ID > -- > 1 > 4 > > And after I add a few more, it may look like this: > > ID > -- > 1 > 4 > 5 > 6 > > So, after a while the ID field has numbers that go all over the place. To > get around this problem, I run a php routine that resets all of the primary > key ids from 1 to whatever. I am worried that if there is more than one user > accessing the database, the data could get mixed up. > > Is there a better way to keep this organized? > > Thank you, > > Beau > > -- > PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, e-mail: php-db-unsubscribe@lists.php.net > For additional commands, e-mail: php-db-help@lists.php.net > To contact the list administrators, e-mail: php-list-admin@lists.php.net