Ahoy!
Steve Ross wrote:
> I'm maintaining a list of images and eventually
> they will overflow the max value of the
> autoincrement primary key. I have a scavenger that
Aha... I tend to use integer unsigned auto_icrement primary key for such column. That gives me a range of 0 ... 4.294.967.295 (= 2^32 - 1). So, you have room for some 4 billion pictures. If you add a picture every second to your table it should last for the next 136 years.
If that's not enough, use bigint unsigned. That one gives you a range of 0 ... 18.446.744.073.709.551.615 (2^64 - 1). That's some trillion pictures which should last until the next ice age.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/numeric-types.html
> The primary key is maintained only to preserve
> chronological order of entry.
>
> Is there a way to do this other than adding a
> timestamp?
A timestamp? MySQL timestamps currently have a resolution of a second. If you add more than one picture per second, there's no exact way to find the proper order of the pictures that have been added within a certain second. Switching to a timestamp does not make much sense unless you need the creation time for some other purpose.
Check the properties of timestamps on
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/datetime.html (all: especially the difference in handling prior and past 4.1 is of general interest).
Ulf