AUTO_INCREMENT tricks

Say, on a mysql database, there’s a table

example_table

that contains a field

example_id

of type

auto_increment

and for some reason, one wants the next value of the auto_increment to be a specific value (x ≥ 0), then, they can do the following in a mysql session:

alter table example_table auto_increment x;

If the above table is not void of data and the current value of the auto_increment is y, one can run the above code, for any x > y only, otherwise an error is produced.

NOTE, if a table has been emptied with the truncate statement, then the auto_increment is reset to the value 1.