On Sep 4, 2007, at 7:15 AM, Satyam wrote:
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.
As the person who started the other thread about this, my big thing was having a continuous record number that I could display to the customer much the way excel displays record numbers.
But after discussing it, I see where my thinking was wrong in how I wanted to achieve it, and also my misunderstanding of the way databases worked. I'm pretty new working with databases, and PHP. HTML and CSS I've done for awhile, just never needed a database or programming language until recently :)
so to put my 2¢ in on this, I would say to leave alone the auto increment field especially if it's included in an index. If you need a record number, either store it in the database in a separate field as tedd suggested, and leave the main auto increment field alone. OR use PHP (Or your favorite programming language) to add a "Record number" to the display.
Okay I'm done now :) -- Jason Pruim Raoset Inc. Technology Manager MQC Specialist 3251 132nd ave Holland, MI, 49424 www.raoset.com japruim@xxxxxxxxxx -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
