what if you have so many entries in a table, that 2^32 is not enough for your auto_increment ID within a given period (day, week, month, ...)?
What if the largest datatype MySQL provides is not enough?
I'm wondering how should I solve a situation where I'm having so many entries added to my table which require unique ID, but I fill up my datatype within one period?
How could I natively within, MySQL (or any other system), achieve unlimited amount of unique IDs or at least increase it exponentially?
Ideally I would expect something like
> SELECT * FROM table;
+---+------+
| a | b |
+---+------+
| 1 | 1 |
| 1 | 2 |
| 1 | 3 |
|...| .... |
|...| .... |
| 1 | 2^32 |
| 2 | 1 |
| 2 | 2 |
+---+------+
Which exponentially increases the amount of entries.
How do you cope with such situations?
Remember - requirement is to have unique ID for any entry.
You could use BIGINT for the primary key. This is a 64-bit number by default.
Edit #2: Apparently what I said before about varying the BIGINT byte length was incorrect. BIGINT is fixed at an 8-byte limit.