RE: [PHP] Dealing with auto-increment in MySQL

[snip] I was wondering if people is asking this in the belief that the autoincrement field is the record position in the database table and that by not reusing those positions, the space of the deleted records is wasted. Perhaps when they say renumbering what they are meaning is compacting the database reusing the empty slots they assume those autoincrement fields point to. Someone remembers dBaseIII .dbf files? Well, perhaps that is the picture they have in mind. [/snip] Maybe, but it seems as if more of this is about keeping a contiguous 'index' of the records contained in the database.